P J Hogan (1997)
We picked this up on television, about thirty minutes in. I remember it as being a hit (and was amazed that was twelve years ago); anticipating a light romantic comedy, I found it less enjoyable but more conceptually compelling – and unusual – than I expected. Julia Roberts is Julianne (a restaurant critic). When she learns that her longtime friend and college contemporary Michael (Dermot Mulroney) is getting married to the years-younger Kimberly (Cameron Diaz), she realises that she’s always been in love with him. (Michael is a sports journalist; Kimberly the student daughter of a billionaire who owns a baseball team.) Julianne tries to stop the marriage – at which she’s also agreed to be maid of honour – by various means. Some of these impromptu stratagems are inoffensively hopeless, like pretending to be engaged to her confidant George (Rupert Everett), who’s gay, in order to make Michael not only jealous but also realise that he’s as much in love with Julianne as she is with him. Other tactics are pretty nasty, like composing an e-mail (even if it does get sent by accident) to make Michael doubt Kimberly. In other words, My Best Friend’s Wedding, written by Ronald Bass, is based on and fuelled by two Hollywood romantic comedy imperatives which in this case are made irreconcilable: we expect a character who’s harbouring an unrealised passion and is played by the star to get her man and an envious, devious bitch who threatens the happiness of others to get her comeuppance.
Julia Roberts is given plenty of routines, physical and verbal, to (over)emphasise that she’s a ‘comical’ character but, to her credit, she doesn’t, behind the pratfalls and the double takes, soften Julianne’s increasingly desperate scheming. Cameron Diaz has a ditsy vividness which is appealing – and funny in Kimberly’s occasional outbursts of freneticism. It’s not the case that this bride-to-be is a pain in the neck who must be denied her prize in the way that the prospective bridegroom in The Philadelphia Story can’t possibly be the man that Katharine Hepburn eventually marries. Michael and Kimberly eventually do get hitched and Julianne is left alone at the wedding dinner (until she ends up dancing with George). You know this is the right ending but, because Julia Roberts has been thwarted, it leaves you feeling deflated and dissatisfied. And because Dermot Mulroney, as Michael, has a real edge and connects with Roberts, the emotional situation gets to be surprisingly charged and complex. Mulroney’s Michael doesn’t give too much away; his being hard to read and the sense that he’s keeping thoughts and feelings to himself create a tension – and give you a sense of Julianne’s frustration that she can’t reach him. The film is best known for Rupert Everett’s performance. Although what he does is fairly obvious, Everett is more assured and animated than usual but I can’t help thinking that audiences warmed to him because George is untroublingly entertaining. Roberts (when she’s not mired in predictable comedy business), Mulroney and Diaz are all more interesting. Philip Bosco is the bride’s father.
25 April 2009
