Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
7/7/07
One of the hardest things
about articulating a critical position on movies is defining and describing
that certain feeling I get in my gut when a movie that's made me laugh
(sometimes a lot) comes to a close and I more or less don't feel anything.
I haven't cried (and yes, I'm a crier), I feel no better than average about
the fact that things worked out for the characters, and I'm just generally
ambivalent about the entire enterprise. The new Robin Williams comedy
License to Wed is such a movie: maybe my position will become
clearer to me after I walk you through the plot.
Ben Murphy (John Krasinski)
and Sadie Jones (Mandy Moore) are an adorable couple who seem made for
each other. So much so that he's finally screwed up the courage to
pop the question. Sadie's only too happy to say “yes”, but on one
condition: she wants to be married in the same church as her parents
(Peter Strauss and Roxanne Hart). Sounds easy enough, but Ben soon
regrets agreeing when he meets Reverend Frank (Robin Williams). He's
a little odd in a “I knocked the real Reverend over the head and took his
place” sort of way and insists that every couple he marries first go through
a “Marriage Preparation Course” of his own creation. Flanked at all
times by a child protégé (John Flitter), Frank proceeds to
torture Ben and Sadie (although she doesn't seem to mind) with one setup
after another designed to get the couple to fight. He bans sex until
after the wedding, bugs the couple's bedroom to gather intelligence, saddles
them with a couple of delightfully disgusting robot babies and keeps showing
up at family events for “exercises” designed to generate maximum strife.
Ben immediately and aggressively resents their new best friend and looks
for the worst possible way out, taking the advice of his friend Joel (DeRay
Davis) to “expose” the Reverend by digging up some dirt on him.
I kept expecting him to discover
Reverend Frank's closet full of unproduced screenplays, because pretty
much everything that happens in License to Wed is pure contrivance.
Frank brilliantly and methodically breaks down Ben and Sadie's relationship
at every turn for what we're assured in the end is a perfectly laudable
goal, but once the film is done burning them to the ground as a couple,
I can't say I felt at all invested in seeing the damage undone. I'm
not really a fan of comedies of relationship sadism, from Meet the Parents
to Everybody Loves Raymond to How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days,
the intentional infliction of emotional distress just makes me dislike
characters, and it's telling that the moment in License to Wed that
got the strongest emotional reaction out of me involved one character punching
another in the face. It's also a little exhausting how The Guy Is
Always Wrong in movies like this. Sure, the screenplay pays some
lip service to the notion that Sadie has some changing to do as well, but
it's never willing to have fun with her faults, only to have Ben react
to every stress like an unlovable idiot.
That said, the film is pretty
funny, especially those nasty robot babies, which made me laugh most every
moment they were on screen. Masterpieces of prop design with their
surly, unlovable faces, nasty, demanding body language and relentlessly
spewing bodily fluids, they are perfect nightmare caricatures of babies.
I also loved Flitter as a character billed only as Choir Boy: the
little kid embraces the sadism of Reverend Frank's methods without any
of his humanism and is a real hoot shouting “The power of Christ compels
you!” while his Mentor tries to “heal” Ben's broken nose. In a role
that gives him license to Go Crazy, Williams is fun: he really can't
lose since we're supposed to both love and resent Reverend Frank, so whatever
reaction you have to his shtick will work for the story. I would
have preferred to see a little more of the dark side that makes the Reverend
such a successfully diabolical manipulator, but I guess we're not really
supposed to see him that way. While neither of them is ever all that
funny, Krasinski and the cute-as-a-button Moore make an adorable couple,
at least until they're not anymore.
I laughed a lot at License
to Wed, and the memory of those awful babies will make me smile for
some time into the future. But the story left me cold. I suppose
as a single adult guy I'm not really the target audience, but I'm not really
sure the film would improve if I spent more time saying “Yeah, that happens
to me all the time!”. I know if it had, it wouldn't have taken me
nearly as long to deliver that punch. |
