*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C-
starring Steve Martin, Diane Keaton, Kimberly Williams, Martin Short
screenplay by Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett and Nancy Meyers & Charles Shyer
directed by Charles Shyer
by Walter Chaw Ah, what could be better than 105 minutes of insipid sentiment laced with racism, homophobia, misogyny, and a relentless, ceaseless torrent of psychotic whining? Some films should come packaged with hypodermics full of insulin–Charles Shyer's Father of the Bride should furthermore contain instructions to jam those puppies right in the ol' eyeballs. Now if there were just something you could do about the whole hearing thing. Steve Martin writes smart books and was a time he performed smart routines: his work in All Of Me remains a high watermark for a certain kind of non-silent physical comedy that resurfaced for a while in the work of Jim Carrey and Jackie Chan. But beginning around the time of Father of the Bride, Martin, with a notable exception or two (The Spanish Prisoner, Joe Gould's Secret), embarked on the Eddie Murphy path of career resuscitation by transforming himself from one of the edgiest comics in the country into king milquetoast of the family-movie brigade–those baby blues, once so cunning in stuff like Pennies from Heaven, now set to glinting doll-like with Gene Wilder bathos as some vomitous Oompa-Loompa score paints us a picture of his bottomless empathy.
George (Martin) and Nina (Diane Keaton) have two kids. One is twenty-something Annie (Kimberly Williams), the other is eight-year-old Matty (Kieran Culkin)–mainly because filmmakers seem to have this itch to cast the prematurely grey Martin as men "his age" and virile at the same time, thus providing him screen spawn that celebrate his eternally-erupting fecundity. Annie is getting married to completely non-descript Bryan (George Newbern), causing Nina to detonate in a poof of talcum and "ha HA!" deliveries spat out with hair flips and huffing. Keaton's only as good as she can be, is what I'm saying–Martin has been a lot better, but this condescending shit never fails to make money and so Martin–again, he's a smart man–follows the green. The news of the nuptials turns George (or amplifies George), meanwhile, into a raving lunatic and unrepentant asshole who complains about every single aspect of his daughter's wedding plans while betraying a rather unhealthy fascination with her sexuality. They go to wedding planner Franck (Martin Short) and his assistant Howard Weinstein (B.D. Wong), both of whom play fag in Bronson Pinchot pidgin to the delight of every single Neanderthal in the audience.
Somewhere along the way, George's unforgivable behaviour is subsumed by Nina and Annie's unforgivable behaviour: he's Ricky Ricardo with the purse strings, and they're Lucy with stupid demands and shrill supplication, turning Father of the Bride into a long sitcom redolent with sitcom jokes and sitcom sentiment. It plays the right kind of person like a harpist plays the world's stupidest harp, plucking at the heartstrings, spanking in the poorly-choreographed slapstick screwball even as it erodes the foundations of everything it purports to hold most dear. It's a comedy of no shame, and it preys on the worst instincts of its viewers. Sharing George's point of view, we scoff at Franck's effeminate airs and his suspicious, uncomfortable simpatico with the gibbering womenfolk. We're invited to feel George's pain at how little the gynecos appreciate how many loans George is going to have to take out against his business to satisfy his coddled princess and her castrating mother. Lots of screaming, lots of crying, lots of hijacking of black culture ("My Girl" plays a key role and is played in its entirety, of course)–begging the question of whether there's ever been a black rom-com that stole Barry Manilow and Roger Whittaker to give their protagonists the illusion of soul. You can't fake what you ain't got; Father of the Bride (a remake of a Spencer Tracy film that was hardly better), for all its glad-handing of cheer and all-encompassing warmth, has a heart as tiny and cold and calculated as a Grinch's. No wonder there was a sequel.
THE DVD
Inexplicably celebrating its fourteenth year of existence with a fifteenth-anniversary DVD, Father of the Bride arrives on the format again from Touchstone (where "T" is for "generally Terrible") in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that looks a lot like soft-focus Showtime porn lit through a gold filter and darkened to the point where skin-tones start to suggest Gordon Willis-sepia. It's a fairytale, get it? That Charles Shyer–what a genius. For what it's worth, grain and edge-enhancement are minimal. A brand new DD 5.1 remix sticks the bulk of the information in the discrete front channels, which means that the dialogue is clear and only the score receives any kind of rear treatment. Shyer provides a feature-length yakker that lapses into silence a lot while offering a good deal of trainspotting and "oh, I like this scene"s. He confesses he hasn't seen the film in over a decade–and if he were me (and I were he), I'd be speechless a lot, too.
I wouldn't, however, reveal how funny I thought it was that B.D. Wong's character has a Jewish name (like Lenny Kravitz, right, except humiliatingly fey and servile in the manner of most Asians), and I'd be a lot more humble, too, in assessing the quality of the picture, but who can argue with success, right? As Shyer declared that "Marty Short was born to play this role," I found myself for the only time in the commentary nodding in agreement. Alan Silvestri's rapturous score decorates the animated menu–after you pop the disc in, you expect to see E.T.s flying over the moon. If you're a fan of Short and Martin, then the five-minute "Martin and Short Interview Each Other" from 1991 is a bad news/good news proposition. Bad news, it's only five minutes long; good news, it feels like it runs five hours.
"An Invitation to Father of the Bride" (11 mins.) is the standard PR rigmarole with clips from the movie, more soundgasms from the quivering baton of maestro Silvestri, and more interview sections from the Short/Martin reel augmented by talking-heads with Charles Shyer and co-screenwriter/ex-wife Nancy Meyers. The horror. The horror. Popping the disc in also cues an automatic trailer for Herbie: Fully Loaded, a home video trailer for The Pacifier, and a preview of "Home Improvement: Season Two". If you skip 'em the first time, you can find 'em again within the main menu.
105 minutes; PG-13; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, French Dolby Surround; English SDH subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Touchstone
