Shared Darkness

With Good Luck Chuck just around the bend, and making such a desperately naked play to position itself as the next Wedding Crashers, I figured it’s time to re-post a slightly redacted version of that film’s original review, originally published in Screen International upon its theatrical release in 2005. To wit:

Jim Carrey remaining devoted to counterbalancing
comedic broadsides with dramatic forays, Hollywood has been in serious need of
a bankable humor infusion. They can call off the search. It’s Vaughn and Wilson who
headline Wedding Crashers, and the
pair deliver a bada-bing smash. A charismatic and indefatigable romp that
strikes just the right balance between well-sketched rudeness and sweetness,
the movie stands poised to dominate the summer comedy sweepstakes.

The story centers on John Beckwith (Wilson)
and Jeremy Grey (Vaughn), two Washington D.C.
divorce mediators who get their off-time kicks posing as brothers or friends
and hopping from nuptial to nuptial. There, they enjoy the free catering,
alcohol and, naturally, love-hungry single women, sweeping the latter off their
feet and into bed. Things change when the guys crash the marriage ceremony of
the oldest daughter of Secretary of the Treasury William Cleary (Christopher
Walken). John falls hard, fast and sincere for youngest daughter Claire (Rachel
McAdams), leaving Jeremy to cope with the amorous advances of Gloria (Isla Fisher), an unleashed stallion of sexual rapaciousness and serial nuttiness. John’s
would-be relationship with Claire is complicated by several obstacles, not the
least of which is of course his phony identity. There’s also Claire’s preppy
jock boyfriend, Sack Lodge (Bradley Cooper).

Writers Steve Faber and Bob Fisher devise a number of clever
ways to extend the joke of Wedding
Crashers beyond the mere hit-and-run pleasures their characters derive,
from having John and Jeremy bet on quoted scripture and ceremonial music (Johan
Pachelbel’s Canon in D, Richard Wagner’s Wedding March Processional, etc.) to
having them bound together by a leave-no-crasher-behind credo with all sorts of
other rider attachments that eventually leads to a cameo by fellow Frat Pack
member Ferrell as Chazz, the sort of mystical patriarch of this culture of
uninvited party-hopping. The writers are careful, too, to paint John and Jeremy as
impish advantage-takers who have a perhaps misguided but nonetheless abiding
love of weddings (and thus romance). This may seem on the surface like
bet-hedging, but it actually works better since the duo’s prevarications are
neither outlandish nor over-the-top. There are real characters here, and the
laughs come from the absurd over-commitment to them, as well as some solid joke
writing.

Director David Dobkin does a very good job of blending the
film’s disparate comedic styles, and while Wedding Crashers generally oversells
the smarmy loathsomeness of Sack (making sure to paint him as a philandering
letch so as not to retain any possible vestige of audience sympathy), the
Cleary clan — a nice admixture of Kennedy and Bush lore and speculation — provides a suitably rich backdrop against which John and Jeremy can spin their
wheels. The cast all have a blast and, again, Wilson and Vaughn
deliver fashionably winning performances. But it’s Fisher who achieves breakout
clarity with her portrayal of the borderline bipolar Gloria. In a world of
demure or artificially amusing straightwomen, she’s not afraid to play
gleefully unhinged. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (New Line, R, 113 minutes)