Wedding Crashers

Starring Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams, Isla Fisher and Christopher Walken

Written by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher

Directed by David Dobkin

What’s all this stuff have to do with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn trying to get laid in a dumb comedy full of tits, homo jokes and guys getting racked in the balls? Well, it’s coming around, so just back off.

Critical opinion on Wedding Crashers has been running about 3-1 for (a 73% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, for you movie stat-heads), and I’ll throw my support behind it as well. It’s not that the movie is destined for greatness, necessarily. It’s really nothing more than a trifle, a bagatelle, an aperitif if you will. It’s just that movie fans, and critics especially, are so starved for a genuine, accessible, semi-original romantic comedy that doesn’t insult your intelligence or star Ashton Kutcher that when we encounter one that even smells different, we latch onto it like a drowning man scrambling for a hunk of driftwood. It’s the minor victories that keep us all sane.

The title of the film pretty much sums it up. Wilson and Vaughn star as John and Jeremy, two aging frat boys who have stumbled upon a hobby that falls somewhere between base-jumping and fly-fishing on the degree-of-excitement scale. From May through September, they troll the local churches and synagogues every Saturday night, find a wedding with a lot of hot bridesmaids, and crash it. They have wedding-going down to a science. They cry on cue, beam at the adorable flower girls, bow their heads during the reading from I Corinthians. At the reception, they have a thousand cover stories to explain which side of the family they’re related to. Then they each pick a likely prospect, turn on the charm and before you can say mozel tov, they’re taking the meat boat to Tuna Town.

Complications arise, of course, when the pair attends a wedding held at the yacht club for the daughter of Treasury Secretary Cleary (Christopher Walken). There John is struck by a thunderbolt in the form of Claire (Rachel McAdams), the Secretary’s daughter. She’s a babe, but she also has brains and a sense of humor. That Claire is the first of many hundreds of bridesmaids John has attempted to tag who has a pulse, strains credulity. But hey— the heart wants what it wants. John wants her badly enough to worm invitations for himself and Jeremy to the Cleary’s Kennebunkport-like family compound for the weekend, where they pretend to be long-lost cousins. Can the boys keep up the charade long enough for true love to blossom— or for them to at least get laid?

What follows is a healthy dose of situational comedy, leavened with some of the snappiest patter to inform an American comedy since Swingers. The common denominator in both films is, of course, Vaughn, who has finally decided to embrace his super powers as a master of repartee and quit trying to be a serious thespian. Since Swingers debuted way back in 1996, Vaughn has had a middling career, including such woeful missteps as subbing for Anthony Perkins in Gus Van Sant’s disastrous Psycho remake. But his failure to join the A-list is not Vaughn’s fault as much as it is Hollywood’s— the studios are simply not churning out the kind of scripts that takes advantage of his skills.

Here, Vaughn is tasked with delivering most of the film’s laughs, and he brings his A-game. Whether he’s getting clotheslined in a touch football game, nearly getting raped by Claire’s brain-damaged brother or getting his ass sprayed with buckshot, he brings the effortless intelligence and rapier delivery of a young Cary Grant. He’s clearly the smartest guy in the room, but he’s not a showboater— he gives the scene exactly what it needs and no more. His performance here is a challenge to screenwriters to give him the material he needs to be a star.

Wilson, meanwhile, has the thankless job of the romantic lead. He’s asked to make goo-goo eyes, appear sensitive at the right moments, and sell the babe-alicious Rachel McAdams as the kind of girl a guy would risk bodily harm for. Like Vaughn, he pulls it off without breaking a sweat. If Vaughn channels Cary Grant, then Wilson is evolving into a latter-day Robert Redford; if he keeps his ego in check and avoids Brad Pitt-like missteps, then he can have Redford’s career.

Performances aside, the picture has its share of misfires. These failures come mostly in the third act, which includes a deflating cameo by another big comedy star who appears to have already boarded the ego train, and in its failure to properly unleash Christopher Walken, who the script keeps in a straightjacket. It’s like trading for A-Rod and then using him as a pinch-hitter.

Most of the naysayers have also derided the picture’s conventional and admittedly sappy ending. Normally I’d be with them, but here they’re missing the point. Wedding Crashers is supposed to be conventional. It’s a classical romantic comedy— classical in the Aristotelian, Shakespearean sense of the word. It so closely observes the conventions of Elizabethan drama that a committee of English professors could have written it. The script utilizes deception, class differences, role reversals, ironic twists— all of the same stuff you’d see in a production of Twelfth Night or Much Ado About Nothing. In this kind of classical structure, a happy ending and a wedding are mandatory.

So while Wedding Crashers isn’t a resounding success, it does achieve its modest goals, and it’s good for a few laughs. The Bard would certainly recognize its kindred spirit. Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, argued that in a perfect society poets would be banished as a distraction from the search for eternal truths. Aristotle wrote Poetics as essentially a refutation of Plato and an argument for the importance of Drama in an ethical society. The essential function of a romantic comedy is to prime society for love, marriage and procreation. Wedding Crashers succeeds admirably at this task— and, thank God, there isn’t a giant phallus in sight.

July 25, 2005
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