Four Weddings and a Funeral. - movie reviews

Christian Century, June 15, 1994 by James M. Wall

Similarly, don't let the previews prevent you from seeing Widow's Peak, Mia Farrow's first picture following her very public parting from Woody Allen. Set in the 1920s, Widow's Peak is about a group of widows who control the politics and culture of a small town in Ireland. Joan Plowright dominates the film with her forceful personality and is caught in some delicious plot twists that suggest the wry humor of those old Ealing Studio comedies from England, which built their humor around quirky but quaint local customs and foibles.

One of the more creative current films that has some of that. Ealing touch is Four Weddings and a Funeral, a British film directed by Mike Newell which shows off the comedic talent of Hugh Grant, who plays a young man who regularly attends weddings but avoids marriage until he meets up with a brash American.

A careful "word of mouth" marketing plan helped establish the picture, as the film to see among young adults. It has its bright, insightful moments, centered on the various ways in which church weddings can go wrong. It is obviously the ceremonial trappings of the weddings, not the spiritual content, that interests the filmmaker. Religion is part of the structure of formality, not something to be taken seriously. This aspect almost makes one nostalgic for those hippie-style outdoor weddings of the movies of the '60s. The clergy are either wooden or bumbling. One young Anglican priest refers to the Holy Spirit as the Holy Spigot (not original humor--certainly not to Marty readers--but in context it is somewhat amusing).

The film also seems to be caught in a time warp, touting irresponsible couplings as though AIDS had not vet arrived. In one scene Andie MacDowell, who plays the American woman who captures Grant's attention, sits in a coffee shop and runs through the list of her previous lovers. By the time she reached No. 30 I expected her to confess that she was kidding. She is serious, however. Her braggadocio may be designed to suggest that women can be as brazen in their conquests as men, but I found the whole episode rather depressing.

For a more complex portrayal of contemporary women, check out The Joy Luck Club at the video store. Based on a popular novel, the film traces the stories of four women born in prerevolutionary China who come to the U.S. and, with varying degrees of success, raise their daughters in a society which is less repressive than the old country but which is nevertheless dominated by men.

In doing some reading about Africa I came across H. Rider Haggard's novel King Solomon's Mines, first published in 1885. A popular adventure story exhibiting a typical 19th-century European view of the continent, Haggard's tale of Allan Quartermain's quest for the source of Solomon's legendary diamonds displays a surprising respect for Zulu king Umbopa. Even more remarkable, however, is a 1937 film, which I found on the library shelf, based rather loosely on the novel. Paul Robeson plays the role of Umbopa, and it's a portrayal Haggard would have appreciated, for it suggests the same dignity and strength in the Zulu king that Haggard conveyes in his novel. Unfortunately, except for Umbopa, King Solomon's Mines, both the novel and the film (the '50 version as well as the '37 version) present the stereotypical black African common to pre-World War II fiction. These portrayals peddle an image of the black African "savage" that contributed to centuries of white exploitation of that continent and its people.

One scene in particular, originally in the novel and repeated in the film, was already lodged in my memory from childhood. White adventurers are confronted by an "evil" African king who threatens to kill them. One of the Englishmen whips out his almanac notes that an eclipse of the sun is imminent. With this splendid and coincidental timing the white men are able to command the sun to darken and thereby frighten the natives into submission. One wonders what kinds of benighted and self-satisfied images future viewers will detect in contemporary films.