Summer summary: 'signs,' 'Greek wedding,' 'rain,' & more - Screen

Commonweal, Sept 13, 2002 by Rand Richards Cooper

Some summer closeout reflections on movies I didn't get to talk about--and you might not have gotten to see--in recent months:

First, the jury is still out on M. Night Shyamalan, the young filmmaker recently hailed by Newsweek as "the next Spielberg." Shyamalan has followed the huge success of The Sixth Sense with the pretentious tedium of Unbreakable, and now a third blockbuster venture into the supernatural--Signs, starring Mel Gibson as a widowed ex-minister whose wife's death in a car accident precipitates a loss of faith, and whose mysterious cornfield cuttings presage a global alien invasion.

Signs was noteworthy for its scary previews; but the heart-stopping trailers expunged a tongue-in-cheek humor that both augments and undercuts the suspense. Shyamalan plays around with themes of alien invasion movies. A blue pink and white baby monitor, held up to the clouds, picks up strange cosmic screeches; a crazed army recruiter spouts manically about aliens; Gibson dolefully endures the impromptu confessions of a teenaged pharmacy employee caught up in end-days hysteria. There's also a curious folksy strain in Shyamalan's dialogue, like the police chief who spins country yarns and says things like "I'm gonna go back and get a cup of Edgar's coffee and try to think clear." Add the pulsing Hitchcockian music of the opening, the existential earnestness of Mel's crisis of faith ("There is no one watching out for us. We are all on our own"), and stray lines that vibrate with a Dada-like, throwaway absurdity: "Everyone in this house needs to calm down--we need some fruit or something." This is a strange hodgepodge of a film. Imagine Quentin Tarantino doing Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a touch of Our Town thrown in.

Jamming these divergent elements together lets Shyamalan keep us distanced--he won't quite let you connect with these characters, and ultimately, I don't think he's all that interested in them. The ending discloses a revelation that makes you reinterpret all that has come before; random details, from Gibson's daughter's habit of leaving half-emptied water glasses around, to his wife's cryptic dying words, are shown to fit. Shyamalan gives this a metaphysical gloss: everything has a purpose and meaning; we're not actually on our own. But it's hard to take seriously as a religious idea, and really it's all about a certain trick of film narrative--indeed, the same sly narrative trick that worked so niftily in Sixth Sense. Newsweek's lionization notwithstanding, one can't help noting that while Spielberg's energies continually overflow boundaries of genre, Shyamalan has already made the same film twice; and that may be, well, a bad sign of things to come.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding is one of those happy industry successes--a small movie boosted by word of mouth into the multiplexes. Adapted from Nia Vardalos's one-woman show, and directed by Joel Zwick, it's a real crowd-pleaser, serving up heaping portions of immigrant-family hilarity. Vardalos plays Toula, a thirty-year-old toiling faithfully in her parents' Chicago diner. Her father (Michael Constantine) agitates endlessly for her to marry; but his notions of matrimony aren't exactly romantic. "Nice Greek girls are supposed to do three things in life," Toula laments. "Marry a nice Greek boy, make babies, and feed everyone till the day we die." One day her Prince Charming walks through the door--a handsome, sensitive, artsy guy named Ian. Ian, of course, is not Greek. Toula's Mister Right is her parents' Mister Wrong--"a big xeno," her father moans, "with long hairs on top of his head!"

The ensuing comedy of ethnicity and class invites us to agonize lovingly along with Toula at her family's garish tastes and over-the-top behavior. A suburban house modeled on the Parthenon; raucous front-yard lamb roasts; celebrations where people mime spitting on one another for good luck: there's no subtlety to Toula's family, or to the film's high-concept contrasts. Ian's parents, pale wasps suffering along in stultifying boredom, writhe in agonies of embarrassment at a rowdy Greek family gathering, downing ouzo until they're blotto. Et cetera. My Big Fat Greek Wedding offers no surprises; it's all geniality and warmth. "Don't let your past dictate who you are--but let it be part of who you become," Toula's rowdy brother advises her in a moment of uncharacteristic sincerity--then adds, "It's from Dear Abby." Vardalos is smart enough to embroider such bromides with tassels of irony. It's a way of having her heartfeltness and mocking it too.

Despite the sometimes cloying cuteness, Vardalos exudes friendly sparkle, and Lainie Kazan and Michael Constantine offer inspired comic turns as her parents. In a lather of self-pity, Constantine rues his daughter's choice of fiance. "Is he good boy? I don't know. Is he from good family? Is he respectful? I don't know." Beneath the comedy lies an insight into how zealously immigrant conservatism values community as a way of knowing. Vardalos understands that the boundary between Us and Them encloses a realm of familiarity and thus of safety; and that for first-generation Americans, entrusting your child to something as capricious as love is like casting her into the sea. In the film's own comic terms, it's a question of what kind of nourishment marriage is supposed to provide. "But I love him," Toula insists. "Oh, Toula," her mother answers in consternation. "Eat something! Please!"