Review of “Bride Wars”
Weddings do tend, on occasion, to bring out the very worst in folk. The heightened emotions often turn people into complete clichés – clichés that are a comedy gold mine. The makers of Bride Wars mine away to their hearts content.
Best friends Liv (Kate Hudson) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) share the same dream – to get married at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Fortune smiles on them when they both find themselves engaged and booked in for June weddings with ultimate wedding planner Marion St Claire (Candice Bergen). Fortune looks the other way, though, and an administration mix-up sees one of the bookings lost, and the girls start to compete for the remaining date, claws out, in an escalating spiral of acts of sabotage.
The reasonable viewer might ask questions such as –wouldn’t actual friends decide to share the date and have a double wedding and not turn into shrewish harridan clichés? Such a viewer, however, has probably never met a real life Bridezilla in action. I have seen lifelong friends never speak to each other over disagreements as mild as hair length or dress colour.
One might also ask – did feminism make no inroads into the female psyche? Surely a wedding and a man are not the only reasons for a woman’s existence. Such thought, however, takes a holiday for the 90-odd minutes of Bride Wars, whose screenplay by Greg DePaul and Saturday Night Live’s Casey Wilson, should provoke no actual thought whatsoever and should be taken only at face value. If it weren’t for the two very winsome leads, I’m afraid this film wouldn’t have much to offer. The comedy is slight at best, but the misses Hathaway and Hudson are a good pairing.
Kate Hudson inherited the Queen of Droll Delivery crown from her mother, while Anne Hathaway, soon to be seen in the fantastic Rachel Getting Married, is the quiet achiever in every film she appears in. Her performances are always elegant and understated, even when acting the maniacal shrew here.
Support from Kristen Johnston as Emma’s surrogate Maid of Honour, and from veteran Candice Bergen, add considerably to the film, while the male characters are token, and almost irrelevant to the whole wedding process. It says a lot that the biggest work on the CV of director Gary Winick are episodes of Ugly Betty. This feels like a little sitcom with a big budget. Still, none of the aforementioned faults will mean a thing to the hoards of overidentifying women who will just love Bride Wars.
CK
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