Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
5/8/08
Of all the movie genres,
there's none that takes more cinematic alchemy to pull off than the Romantic
Comedy. Let's be honest, you can likely count all the romcoms you've
seen with real, quality, unique three act stories without needing your
toes. When they work, it's because of things that are hard to quantify:
star power, chemistry, writing that's light on its' feet even if not structurally
sound. But when they go wrong, it's pretty easy to quantify.
I could go on all day about the flaws of Made of Honor, a labored,
charmless love story for which I'd had high hopes. It's a movie only
for completists of its' appealing stars and screenwriters looking to study
what they should never do.
Tom (Patrick Dempsey) lives
a charmed life as the inventor of that paper cup sleeve you use to hold
coffee (fun fact: a Jim Chelossi, who I'd probably like better than
Tom, did that in real life). Getting three cents for every one that's
used, he spends his time hanging out with platonic best friend Hannah (Michelle
Monaghan), playing sports with his buddies and having casual sex with assorted
bimbos. Wait, did I say “casual”? It's anything but, as the
apparently OCD-stricken Tom has a lengthy list of Official Rules designed
to keep his relationships from ever becoming legitimate, and he quotes
them relentlessly to anyone who'll listen. Hannah, for reasons unknown,
puts up with this while the two of them pal around in a rigidly predefined
set of friendly rituals including antiquing and ordering each others' desserts.
One day, business calls and Hannah's got to go to Scotland for six weeks;
no problem, Tom thinks, until he actually tries to spend that time without
his Best Friend. Unable to find a bimbo interested in ordering his
dessert for him, he decides he's really in love with Hannah and will reveal
those feelings upon her return. And return she does... with a whirlwind
fiancee in tow. Colin (Kevin McKidd) is Scottish royalty who's better
than Tom in every way. To add insult to injury, she asks her pal
to serve as her Maid of Honor at the wedding. He accepts, but not
out of friendship. Instead, he's got a vague plan to sabotage the
nuptials. Episodic hijinx ensue, all killing time to see how long
Tom can wait to simply state his true feelings.
There's a germ of a great
idea at Made of Honor's heart: while a lot of the stereotypes
tying certain activities to one gender or another don't really hold true,
I dare say 99% of men do not have a close enough female friend that they'd
willingly serve as a Maid of Honor. But rather than find fish out
of water humor in putting a Guy's Guy through the paces of helping to plan
his Best Friend's Big Day, Made of Honor cuts straight to the contrivance
of his attempts to sabotage it. Wedding sabotage comedy is a dicey
business. It can work really well when the wedding in question is
a really bad idea (as Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
is proving as we speak), but breaking up a couple that's just 10% less
meant to be than the one the movie expects us to root for is, at best,
a queasy exercise. Here, it doesn't work at all. Yes, Colin
asks an awful lot of Hannah, uprooting her from New York to Scotland.
But if bad Scottish food and annoying In-Laws are the extent of the horrors
that are to be foisted upon her if Tom can't stop the ceremony, well, most
couples should be so lucky. I was reminded of the still-baffling
Sweet Home Alabama, in which an utterly perfect Dempsey lost Reese
Witherspoon to shiftless jerk Josh Lucas just because he made glass art
on the side.
Which is my way of saying
that despite all of Dempsey's considerable charm, Tom never seems like
much of a prize. He talks on an on about “honesty” to justify his
laundry list of Rules, but there's nothing in the movie that suggests he's
ever interested in anything but himself. He wants sex, he picks up
hotties who are expected to sit by the phone waiting for their turn on
the Tom's Rules Express to come back up. He wants friendship, he
expects Hannah to schedule her life around him. When she doesn't,
he decides to break up her wedding. Sure, their friendship seems
to be the real thing, but it's a cloying Movie Friendship that made me
not want to be sitting next to the movie's stars at a restaurant.
Nothing to build a romantic comedy on.
But then, the movie doesn't
really have a handle on life as it is lived by humans, so it's hard to
imagine it being able to craft a resonant friendship. Hannah's probably
the film's best character simply because she has no real characteristics
other than as a mirror for Tom to regard himself in. Its' worst is
Tom Sr., perhaps the low point of Sydney Pollack's fine side career as
an actor. You see, Tom Sr. has issues with love and commitment, so
he keeps getting married over and over, negotiating one divorce and the
next prenup at the same time as he prepares to marry a woman (Kelly Carlson)
so stereotypically golddigging that she demands a maximum amount of weekly
sex be written into the agreement. “He does realize he can just date?”
Hannah asks, and I wondered why she wasn't asking the writers instead.
Perhaps worst of all, the movie makes a running joke of the 74-year old
Pollack's inability to remember the precise number of times he's been married,
which the film reveals to be a whopping... six. Such poverty of imagination
and miscalculation about human nature infuses the entire production.
And while the actors do what
they can with their material, flop sweat hangs over any production that
blasts pop music over the slow-motion introduction of many of its' supporting
players, a few of whom are bizarre caricatures from some third universe
with nothing in common with this movie's or ours (the weird gym guy in
the short pants is in at least five scenes too many, while the creepy blogger
obsessed with Tom looks like a running joke when she first appears... and
then is never seen again). The Scottish stereotypes we meet at Colin's
ancestral home are at least a little funnier, particularly his aunt (Myra
McFadyen), who speaks in an amusingly indecipherable accent that leads
to a fun punchline at the end.
At the end of the day, the
horribly-titled Made of Honor's biggest flaw is its' own refusal
to commit. Its' characters live in a Bizarro World that makes any
attempt to comment on love or friendship pointless, but the film is also
afraid to go for real, sustained laughs. I've mentioned before that
some movies are made only for people who're pleased by almost anything
in a certain genre, but I wouldn't recommend Made of Honor to even
romantic comedy diehards. It's just not romantic, and it's just not
funny. Now, if all you need to get you through 100 minutes is to
see a lot of Patrick Dempsey, you might be OK. |
