Four Weddings and Funeral - about love, but not in the way you'd think

What to do on a Friday night in when your girlfriend is deeply uninterested in the stack of 'good film' DVDs?  Well you go on Netflix and discover that Four Weddings and a Funeral has appeared.  It is 24 years since the release of Four Weddings and Funeral, and as such 23 years since I saw it.  Surprisingly little arm-twisting was required to get me to watch it.  Yes - surprisingly little.

There are a lot of people out there for whom the film will require no introduction, such was its absolute domination in British popular culture in the mid-90s.  It made a star out of Hugh Grant and raised Wet Wet Wet to the status of pop gods after the film's sound track included 'Love is all around' - which then spent the whole of the summer of 1994 at position #1 in the UK singles charts.  The film's title explains its structure.  We follow Hugh Grant and his lower / middle / upper London society friends as they free-load their way through 4 weddings and 1 funeral.  It's a series of 5 short vignettes, each beginning shortly before the event with Hugh Grant (playing Charles) swearing merrily as he struggles to arrive on time.  At each event we see a little more about the connections between the characters, and learn that Charles worries he will never find the woman of his dreams, that he will never have his 'thunderbolt' moment when he falls in love.  At wedding 1, Charles meets the mysterious American Carrie (Andie MacDowell), after wedding 4 doesn't pan out as planned, Charles and Carrie have their 'thunderbolt' moment.  The end.

This film is seminal for many people - but not for me.  Far too many head-scratching oddities about the story.  It is never clear why this group of people of different ages and backgrounds are friends.  Perhaps it's meant to reflect the political rhetoric of 90's Britain in which John Major called for a post-class society?  It's hardly representative of British society though.  Why did they include a mute character as Charles brother?  He brings much needed heart to the story, but having conversations in sign language slows the pace of the film down at crucial moments.  It certainly nails the film as one that wants all-inclusive Britain in the modern age ensuring everyone is represented.  But doing this to the detriment of your story-telling is extraordinarily careless.

The most glaring oddity is the final 5 minutes.  There are 3 specific things that happen in the final 5 minutes that undercut much of any prior enjoyment.  The first is Charles and Carrie kissing in the rain - Andie MacDowell's line "I hadn't noticed it was raining" is one of the most jarringly poor moments of acting I've ever seen in a major motion picture.  Perhaps the line itself is the issue, and MacDowell's problem is that she's trying to work out how to deliver it without sounding like she's reading the script.  Whatever - it takes you out of the drama immediately.  The second is the literal thunderbolt we hear when Charles and Carrie declare their love in the rain.  I know that we have been told Charles has been searching for his 'thunderbolt' moment all his life - but seriously: if you look up the meaning of weather in fiction 1-0-1, it says thunder = bad.  If someone says something and then thunder and / or lightening happens, it means THIS IS BAD.  This casual misuse of the language of storytelling is perhaps more jarring even than Andie MacDowell's inability to deliver bad dialogue.  The third thing is that the most sympathetic character in the film, played by the best actor in the film (Kristin Scott Thomas as Fiona), is revealed in the closing montage as the only character who ends up with no one despite previously declaring her life-long love for Charles.  So we have bad acting, bad use of audio effects and a bad epilogue.  What hope for love Richard Curtis?

So the message of the film is that people who demonstrate heartfelt love are doomed to live a single life?  Or perhaps the thunderbolt that accompanies Charles and Carrie kissing really should be taken as a bad omen.  After all Carrie spends the night with Charles after wedding 2, when she is already with her future husband of wedding 3 - perhaps she's not as loyal as Charles imagines.  Perhaps their time together will be as short-lived like all Charles' other relationships?  Perhaps the message is that pining for your 'thunderbolt' moment stops you seeing what's in front of your eyes?  Perhaps the film's not quite as superficially about love as most of its fans in the 1990s imagined?

Or maybe it's simply a feel-good movie that reflected the cultural dynamics of the era, put its handsome young leading man in a series of good suits at weddings, didn't think very hard about its plot / structure and came out on top by rinsing a pop track until everyone was sick to death of hearing it.  Anyway, I wouldn't go too far out of your way to watch it.  Watch Black Mirror instead.  Seriously.

A Simple Favour - random tone

Get this - I went to the cinema the other weekend!  It has been a very, very long time since I actually passed through a real life movie theatre - close to 9 months in fact.  Since February I've lived within walking distance of Aldershot Cineworld, and as such this omission is even more sharply brought into light.  With the internet on temporary blink and shitty weather in the outdoors, the cinema was a-calling.

Choices then - what was the least-bad-looking thing on at midday on a Saturday?  Anna Kendrick in some sort of dark comedy I suppose.  Why not.  The reviews told me it was a bit mad but good for entertainment - which is pretty much an assessment I agreed with having watched 2 hours of tonally shifting film that does its best to defy easy pigeon-holing.

Anna Kendrick plays Stephanie, a single mother who does home video blogs and is about as close to middle-of-the-road suburban niceness as it is possible to get.  Blake Lively is Emily, a city-working, high-heel-wearing, hard drinking, liberally swearing complete opposite of Stephanie.  Emily is introduced to us stiletto-first, baffling Stephanie with her assurance, her face covered over with a huge umbrella.  Foreshadowing innit.  Emily and Stephanie somehow become friends, Emily asks Stephanie to look after her son for a bit, Emily disappears.  Cue mystery.

At its heart the film contains a mystery that's easily intriguing enough for 2 hours of your life.  Lively and Kendrick excel, and when the plot swerves into unexpected territory it's done with pace and enough commitment to its own sense of bonkersness that it just works.  Just.  This is a film that contains a lot of swerves of plot direction, and crucially of tone.  In one moment the film is a Mrs Marple mystery, then its secondary characters are giving it mmm hmm, then it's Gone Girl, and then back to slapstick silliness.  Tone is the most important thing in a film.  To paraphrase RedLetterMedia - there is a reason there isn't a pie-in-the-face gag at the start of Citizen Kane.  Mess with the tone and you mess with everything in the film.  The script and the performances carry A Simple Favour, which is no bad thing of course.  But it ain't no Gone Girl.

I first saw Anna Kendrick alongside George Clooney in Up in the Air and I thought she would have a big career eventually.  I suppose that is what's happening now, what with starring as the lead here and fronting the Pitch Perfect series.  I would like someone to convince her to take on some more serious roles soon.  The things she's most famous for are mostly rather silly.  She ain't going to get no Oscar nominations for starring in the nth iteration of a wildly popular a capella sing-a-thon.