Director: Lee Friedlander
Running Time: 96 mins
Certificate: 15
Release Date: October 19th, 2009
Farce is a tough thing to pull off because it takes a lot of skill to build a situation that convincingly grows from a simple mix up to an impossibly complex, over-the-top situation, without seeming contrived or desperate. It’s a line that Out At The Wedding tries to walk with only middling success.
Alex has told her mixed-race fiancé that her family is dead, largely because she thinks her Southern patriarch father is racist. Obviously she hasn’t told her family that she has a non-white boyfriend, with the result that when she goes to her sister’s wedding, a mix-up ends up with everyone thinking she’s a lesbian. Not long after Alex gets back to New York, her sister comes to visit, which involves Alex paying a woman to pretend to be her girlfriend and trying to hide her fiancée from view.
Although Out At The Wedding has some fairly amusing moments and skips along from one misunderstanding to the next in a jolly enough fashion, it’s difficult to get over the fact that rather than being based on a simple mistake ending up being blown out of all proportions, it’s about a woman who’s a bit of a bitch and lying about fairly important things to everyone she supposedly cares about. Thankfully though everyone around Alex is much easier to get on with, such as her sister, who starts to wrestle with her sexual identity, and her gay best friend Fred (played by Charlie Schlatter, who actually seemed more convincingly camp as straight Dr. Jesse in Diagnosis Murder).
It’s the sort of film that while not a complete success is a pleasant enough date movie, with people learning valuable lessons and getting into endless farcical scrapes. There are also enough funny lines to paper over the cracks of a lightweight but decent enough screwball comedy.
Overall Verdict: The main character may be a bit of a bitch but rest of Out At The Wedding is an entertaining enough screwball farce.
Special Features: Trailers, Photo Gallery
Reviewer: Tim Isaac
(This review previously featured on MovieMuser.co.uk)
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