White-Bread Wedding
If
you really like Jennifer Lopez and Matthew McConaughey, don't encourage movies
like this.
The Wedding Planner begins with footage of a seven-year-old girl
performing a wedding ceremony with her Barbies, a fitting opening since the
movie that ensues could almost be the result of a screenwriter literally
transcribing the play scenario enacted by a small child and her dolls. If you
were (or are) a child very much like this little girl, you're in the perfect
target demographic for the movie. If you're the boyfriend of such a person,
your woman is going to owe you big time after she drags you to this. Think My
Best Friend's Wedding, subtract gay best friend, dorky karaoke scene,
charm, and any hint of malice or conflict, and you've got it.
Jennifer Lopez is Mary (as in
"the Virgin..."), an obsessive San Francisco wedding planner who
treats nuptial ceremonies like military operations, delivering preplanned
"from the heart" speeches to nervous brides, using military-style
jargon ("F.O.B." is father of the bride, "Dark Tower" a
hairdo tall enough to block the video cameras), barking orders into a headset,
and even feeding the best man his "spontaneous" toast via a hidden
earpiece. The alleged irony of the film is that, while planning the happiness
of couples everywhere, Mary hasn't had any kind of love life herself
("Those who can't wed, plan"). That a woman
as rich and as beautiful as she is has no dating prospects is something you
just have to accept, but perhaps the tight bun her hair is often tied in makes
her look too uptight. That, or the fact that her main
hobby is playing Scrabble.
Mary's dating prospects are so
bad that her Italian father (Alex Rocco) has taken the time to try to arrange
her marriage to a childhood acquaintance named Massimo (Justin Chambers), a
former mud-eating nerd who now rides a motor scooter, obsesses over his
machismo, drinks wine from the bottle, and tells Mary how ugly she used to be.
He is good-looking, but that's not enough. Despite her father's insistence that
real love doesn't just come out of the blue, she holds out hope, and this being
a movie, she is ultimately proved correct.
One high-heeled shoe caught in a
manhole as a stereotypical Asian bad driver knocks a huge Dumpster directly at
Mary later, she is literally swept off her feet by Dr.
Steve Edison (Matthew McConaughey), a charming pediatrician with a slow
Southern drawl and a laid-back sense of humor. He's the perfect guy, sensitive
and masculine. He even has an annoyingly cutesy quirk: buying M&Ms and
throwing away all the nonbrown ones because they have artificial colors, and
because the brown ones are the color of chocolate (hasn't anyone told him that
the coloring is actually on the candy shell, which isn't naturally
brown...ah, never mind). So anyway, Steve and Mary go out to a movie and dance
in
Perhaps one would expect a
little comic mayhem to ensue. But one would be wrong. Mary befriends Fran, and
decides to be professional about the whole thing. Dorky Massimo shows up
periodically to try to add humor, then abruptly transitions from reckless jerk
to caring empath. Kevin Pollak appears for a minute or two as Steve's best
friend, only to never be seen again. And this being
Like Save the Last Dance,
The Wedding Planner is written and directed by first-timers (director
Adam Shankman is a dance choreographer; former husband-and-wife writing team of
Pamela Falk and Michael Ellis claim this as their only produced screenplay),
and it shows: The film is laden with contrivances. To cite a few examples among
many: Why, when being questioned about her new dream guy (Steve) by Fran, does
Mary tell her absolutely everything about him except his name, which would
eliminate all confusion right away by inadvertently revealing him as Fran's
fiancé? Why doesn't Mary speak up when Massimo publicly claims to be engaged to
her, thereby saving herself a sizable amount of embarrassment? Why does Massimo
suddenly undergo a complete personality change, and why does a hardened and
cynical single like Mary instantly believe it? The answer to all of these
questions, of course, is that there'd be no movie if these people acted like
real people. And while romantic fantasy is frequently unrealistic, it is the
duty of the filmmakers to persuade us to believe it, an effect not achieved by
making things up as you go along, as these folks seem to have done.
Even bigger than any of the plot
mysteries, however, is why McConaughey and Lopez would be attracted to the
script in any way. McConaughey's taken his fair share of knocks in the press
for the undeserved hype surrounding his breakthrough in A Time to Kill,
but the man is nothing if not natural on camera, and he's about the only thing
that saves The Wedding Planner from being instantly forgettable. It
takes a good deal of charm to make lines like "What if something I think
is great is great, but it's not as great...as something greater?"
sound plausible, but one can almost believe it comes from his heart as
delivered herein. As for Lopez, she undoubtedly wants to craft a fully
developed leading-lady persona after her butt-kicking roles in the likes of The
Cell and Out of Sight, but she's not helping herself by choosing bad
scripts like this one, or by singing a horrible pop song for the soundtrack,
which also includes the syrupy likes of Olivia Newton-John, John Denver, and
Sourceror. It's enough to make you wish Lopez's real-life beau Puff Daddy would
show up and commence the busting off of caps in asses.