Maybe, when I’m retired, divorced, have kids who are divorced and have enough time on my hands to try tantric sex for nine hours without thinking ‘I must hang up the washing’ , things that mean everything now, will mean nothing then.
Maybe, in my Tenna Lady years, I’ll breeze over the fact my partner has just shagged his ex and prolifically fallen off the wagon in a scotch-stenched exhibition at our daughter’s wedding. And, when the true love of my lover’s life has come to stay in our lake house I won’t get jealous. I’ll sit among the empty Dom P bottles swilling a champagne flute and raise a toast to her arrival, but not before getting caught being fellated on the kitchen table. If The Big Wedding’s depiction of retired life is true, I want a time machine to get me there quicker.
In that gluttonous, glossy lifestyle that looks like a centre park brochure, this preppy, starch-ironed family gear up to see the marriage of an adopted son who is marrying the Barbie-esque daughter despite the bristles from her parents who are trying, and failing, to accept their darling daughter marrying a ‘beige’ boy.They’re one step away from calling him a half-breed.
Boy gets his ‘exotic’ genes from his long lost Spanish mother who gave him up for adoption when she got pregnant too young with a bean farmer (yes really). When it is announced that the long-lost mother is attend the wedding, the boy’s adopted family put on a charade to prove to her they’re ‘normal’, when of course they are as batty as a cricket match.
Meet the Fookers, it ain’t. This is a vanilla family doing their best to be dysfunctional, because life’s so much more interesting when you’re dysfunctional – ask Channel 5. It’s a polite ‘romp’-com and another of Hollywood’s attempts to prove that retired people still have sex and that Robert Di Nero has a mortgage to pay.
It may boast a promising cast, but the film falls flat. The clumsy racial stereotypes felt uncomfortable (racism’s only acceptable if it’s funny, right?) punchlines were met with bemused silence and the hasty finale felt clobbered. Give The Big Wedding a big miss.
Released: UK – 29th May 2013
Director: Justin Zackham
CorrinaCorrina 