My Big Fat Greek Wedding Review
by John Sylva (DeWyNGaLe AT aol DOT com)September 23rd, 2002
MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING (2002)
Reviewed by John Sylva
(C) 2002, TheMovieInsider.com
Just for kicks and giggles, consult your inner David Lynch for a moment (your brains are tired after the senselessness of summer, after all), and piece yourself into the following conglomeration of different times and events. It's a scorching July evening in Chicago, and the best, nearest entertainment to be found is at a nightclub in which a relative unknown comedienne named Nia Vardalos is performing. You stumble in because you're bored, broke, and burning up, and the place, you hear, has a top-of-the-line air-conditioning system. When you walk in, Mountain Dew and portable fan in hand, you observe quite the scene: First, you see Jodie Foster sitting at a table in the back, seemingly alone (but possibly with the still unnamed father of her child), drinking the night away after the failure of her The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys at the box office. Amused, you look around for more diversion only to discover Kate Hudson, running out the door long before Vardalos has gotten the chance to give any more insights about her father's ability to give you the Greek origins of any American word. Your eyes then lock on Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, sitting attentively and laughing themselves silly, in the very front of the club. Funny, Hanks is even in full costume as Road to Perdition's Chicago gangster Michael Sullivan. Suddenly becoming Hanks/Sullivan yourself (right on, Mulholland Drive's Diane Selwyn would be proud), you realize that this woman's life will soon be the inspiration for a film that will manage to attract more moviegoers than films starring Eddie Murphy, Al Pacino, Harrison Ford, and Chris Rock do combined--even if it does possibly mean taking out a few people along the way. So, seeing as that's far too much food for thought for the season, you exit the club some time and many laughs later, ready to make sense of what it is you've just witnessed, coming to several realizations about the current state of the perception of both our own and other cultures in America.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the success story of 2002, owes much of its success to Tom Hanks and wife Rita Wilson: Like Jodie Foster's helping to fund this summer's The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, the couple were driving factors in the bringing of Vardalos' sketch about her very Greek family to an even bigger entertainment medium. Both taking producer credits here, Hanks and Wilson discovered Vardalos in a club like the one mentioned above, liking what they saw so much that they fought to share it with others. Greek going American? This is where Ms. Hudson enters. Reportedly, the actress came to consider all Americans as loud and obnoxious beings as a result of her experience working on the upcoming French-set comedy Le Divorce (On a side note, isn't this something of a conundrum, especially considering Goldie Hawn, her mother, is quite well-known for her bombastic, vivacious personality?). Now, before My Big Fat Greek Wedding hit theaters, I would have predicted murder or some other sort of harsh infliction of pain would be on not only her's but many an Americans' to-do-lists if ever encountered individuals as eccentric and raucous as those featured in My Big Fat Greek Wedding; after all, ethnic humor nowadays is generally as stale as a loaf of last week's Italian bread. The breaking of this not-so-pleasant tradition, plain and simple, is what's making this film such a refresher to audiences and critics alike. Vardalos, starring as Toula, plays her role of the unsuspecting subject of an America's affections like no one else could have, with quirks and intricacies that are unquestionably akin to her own personality, making hers a character completely unlike the typical Julia Roberts romantic comedy lead. Her family is filled with personalities that are so close to caricatures you can almost see right through them, yet they're performed and depicted with such a warmth and sense of good humor that their vapidity simply doesn't matter. They're too fun, too funny, and, ultimately, too familiar to scrutinize.
So, now, instead of taking on a different identity, simply imagine yourself: an ordinary moviegoer caught in an even more ordinary movie season, looking for the same brainless, cheap excitement at the local cinema that everyone else is. One hot summer's day, you walk into My Big Fat Greek Wedding, thinking, based on the advertisements you've seen, that it will be the perfect antidote to the typical summer movie. When you exit the theater, however, you realize that, if anything, this film has affirmed the fact that summer movies are all about twists and turns and surprises and thrills and chills more than anything. It's just that, here, all of these elements stem from something even greater than the extravagant stunts of XXX or the calculated spooks of Signs: humanity. The twists are the unexpected, spontaneous decisions of characters, the turns happen in the meeting of parents from two wildly different cultures, the surprises lie in how the simplest nuance is able to provoke the biggest laugh or smile, the thrills take place within a relatively simple marriage proposal, and the chills come in the form of a giant pimple on the Big Day. For everyone who claims that the lives of "ordinary" people on film can't be interesting without involving the murder of a loved one or a spouse's being involved in an affair, I point only to this charming comedy.
GRADE: B
Film reviewed September 22nd, 2002.
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