Four Weddings and a Funeral. - movie reviews

National Review, May 2, 1994 by John Simon

THE GOOD old Eeling comedies look better than ever in retrospect, as we search in vain for the likes of Alec Guinness, Dennis Price, Stanley Holloway, Joan Greenwood, Joyce Grenfell, Glynis Johns, and all the rest. Only Joan Plowright today captures that spirit, but, of course, those movies are no longer being made, which is why British actors such as Gary Oldman and Tim Roth have to learn to make like Americans and appear in our unlikely clinkers in even unlikelier roles.

So I went with, so to speak, great expectations to Four Weddings and a Funeral "filmed entirely on location in London and the home counties," with only one American in it, and playing, safely, an American. The mere word "wedding" in the title brought back memories of A Quiet Wedding, with the still undervalued Margaret Lockwood and a dream supporting cast. Let me tell you right off that Four Weddings is not in that league, and not even throwing in that one funeral by way of tragic relief adds much dimension to it.

This is the story of a group of friends seen from the perspective of four weddings and one funeral. The special focus allows the writer, Richard Curtis, to present the characters only as participants in weddings or mourners at a funeral. Such tunnel vision works well on stage in, say, a bedroom farce. On film, as time passes and the scene shifts, and people fall into bed or into their graves, confess secret loves they have been harboring for one another, despair over ever finding proper partners, a lot of emotional baggage accumulates, and the viewer cries out for more information: Who are these people really? What do they do for a living? Only one or two of them seem wealthy enough to do nothing whatsoever.

If the comedy were coruscating throughout, if the dialogue were consistently entrancing, these nagging questions might not obtrude. In the first episode, Charles, our hero, is the best man at a friend's wedding. He and his punker sister and roommate, Scarlett, barely get there on time (it's in one of those home counties), and then he finds he has forgotten the wedding rings. He spots among the wedding quests Carrie, a pretty American, and becomes besotted with her. Out of this, Curtis and his director, Mike Newell, manage to weave a reasonably tangled web, but the quick consummation of Charles and Carrie's infatuation, and her prompt departure for America, leave a peculiar taste in the mouth. The perfunctoriness with which the lovers are thrown together, the manipulativeness with which they are pulled apart, and so back and forth from wedding to funeral to wedding, shrieks contrivance at us a little too loudly.

Surrounding our storybook pair, there are benighted pairs, clumsy pairs, grotesque pairs. There is also a homosexual pair, and Charles has a deaf-mute brother with whom he communicates in sign language. Needless to say, the homosexual lovers display the most touching rapport, and the conversationally challenged brother proves to be the wisest member of the group. At one wedding, Charles is seated with a bunch of his catty former mistresses--could contrivance be more rampant? At another wedding, one member of the group, a newly minted clergyman, officiates, and commits verbal lapses on the order of "Holy Spigot" and "Holy Goat," etc. The comedian Rowan Atkinson does well by the part, but it is strictly a stand-up routine, not genuine comedy. And the film's tone calculatedly veers from the farcical to the poignant, the whole thing as formally straitjacketed as a fugue.

About one-fourth of the jokes--repartee and sight gags--come off. What is lacking is that seeming spontaneity of the best comedies: not being able to smell the scriptwriter behind the laughs. "There's nothing more offputting at a wedding than a priest with an enormous erection" sounds somehow prefabricated to me, as does this piece of folk etymology for "honeymoon": "It's the first time a husband gets to see his wife's bottom." And I'm not sure everyone will relish the reminiscence of one male character about an old school friend: "Head of my house. Buggered me senseless. Still, taught me a lot of things."

The homosexual element is very strong here, and not only in the depiction of the homosexual couple: the flamboyant Gareth (Simon Callow, a bit over the top) and the devoted Matthew (John Hannah, subtle and effective). There is something tendentious about allowing the bereaved Matthew, delivering Gareth's eulogy, the only truly literate dialogue--or monologue--in the film, complete with the reading of a poem by W. H. Auden; nowhere else is there even a passing reference to literature. Moreover, no woman in the film is as lovingly scrutinized as is Hugh Grant (Charles). From the very opening shots, as he wakes up in bed, the camera explores every part of him, leaving no nostril uninvaded. It is he who wears the lightest and most clinging garments, with ampler decolletage than any of the women; it is his former lovers who hover over him; it is he who is the film's chief love object.