Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In the glory days of theater-going, movie fans would sit back, relax, and enjoy not one but two features at their favorite movie theater. While it’s more difficult to find in our multiplex era, the wide variety of movie titles on streaming services means movie lovers can have their own double feature in the comfort of their own homes — and we’re here to help you decide what to watch. In this week’s edition of the Decider Double Feature, it’s all about Wedding Season with two wedding-centric comedies that feature unlikely anti-heroines in My Best Friend’s Wedding and Bachelorette.
There’s a point in everyone’s lives when weddings become fun. When you’re a kid and dragged along with your parents, you have to sit through a very boring ceremony, watch two adults kiss (gross), and then sit through a very long dinner and possibly be forced to talk to a lot of your old relatives you didn’t even know you had. Then your friends start to get married, and you realize that, despite how much the whole thing costs, weddings are suddenly a lot of fun. You’re happy for your friends getting hitched, you get to see old friends you haven’t seen in a while, and you can get very drunk and dance a lot all while celebrating love and companionship.
And then there’s a point when weddings become a hassle again. Maybe it’s because you’re tired of flying across the country. Or you don’t drink as much as you used to. Or you get too tired from dancing a fraction of what you could do before. Or you’re simply no longer believe in love, probably because the friends who got married in your first barrage of post-college weddings have now gotten divorced.
Weddings are complicated, and stressful. Sometimes fun! And a lot of times not. And that’s precisely why they make such great fodder for the movies.
An imminent wedding ceremony is the premise for countless romantic comedies, but for my money there is no contemporary classic that both honors and skewers the genre like P.J. Hogan’s My Best Friend’s Wedding —an anti-rom-com, if you will— that has the audience cheering for the bad guy. The bad guy in this case is Julia Roberts’s Jules, a successful Manhattan restaurant critic who realizes, upon the eve of her 28th birthday, that her best friend Michael (Dermot Mulroney) is engaged — despite the fact that these one-time lovers made a fairly loose pact to get married if they were both single by their 28th birthdays. With Michael’s nuptials taking place in just a few days (despite being best friends, Michael and Jules apparently don’t keep in contact), Jules plans to show up and break up the ceremony as she’s realized that’s she’s been carrying a torch for this guy for years.
The movie is charming, and it’s arguably one of Julia Roberts’s best roles — particularly because she pulls of the anti-hero role so precisely and brilliantly. And the film as a whole is celebratory; there are musical sequences, after all, with songs from the Burt Bacharach songbook. It’s a movie devoted to love, of both the romantic and platonic sort, and the kind of film that makes a wedding seem really fun even if there are last minute hi-jinks between the bride, the groom, and the maid of honor hell-belt on calling the whole thing off.
If My Best Friend’s Wedding is a movie for people who love weddings, Bachelorette is for those who have come to resent the tradition. Based on her off-Broadway play, writer-director Leslye Headland’s debut feature is a misanthropic, coke-fueled romp following three best friends and bridesmaids who nearly (and unintentionally) pull off what Jules sets out to do: ruin their friend’s wedding.
Kirsten Dunst stars as the low-key terrifying Regan (pronounced “Ree-gan”), the leader of a clique of life-long friends known as the B-faces. Of the foursome — including Lizzy Kaplan’s cocaine-addict Gena, Isla Fisher’s ditzy Katie, and Rebel Wilson’s chubby Becky — Regan is the one who is on the right life track: she has a good job, a doctor boyfriend, and a wedding dress already picked out for the eventual ceremony. But her life is up-ended when it’s Becky who announces that she’s the first to be wed. Harnessing her jealousy in order to take charge of Becky’s wedding, Regan sees her usual composure suffer when she’s reunited with her self-destructive friends.
A seemingly harmless, if mean-spirited, prank goes wrong when Regan and Katie split Becky’s dress in two when the two women try to fit in it together. Suddenly, the three set out on a manic, After Hours-style tour through Manhattan in order to get the dress fixed in the few hours before the morning ceremony. More booze flows, more cocaine snorted, and the ladies cross paths with three groomsmen who serve as emotional foils to their plot: Clyde, Gena’s high school boyfriend; Joe, a kind-hearted dope who always carried a torch for Katie; and Trevor, a sleaze who just wants to get Regan into bed (or, more likely, a strip club bathroom).
Bachelorette is in no way a romance, even if there are some happy couplings by the time the credits roll. Instead, it’s a look at how phony and exhausting the wedding industrial complex can be. But even more deeper (and darker) is its examination of female friendships and young womanhood, what it means to strive for the things American culture has decided every young girl should want — and to recognize that all the work one puts into herself might not guarantee the beautiful, happy ending. Unlike My Best Friend’s Wedding, however, it takes more of an effort to examine why the unlikable hero — all of them, in fact — is the person she is. Put together, the two comedies are fast-paced and witty, often downright acidic and cynical. Love is great, companionship beautiful. But the performance of it all is the thing that can drive us all a little nuts.
Tyler Coates is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.
