Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
6/17/09
Although,
like many others, I got curious because of the sheer amount of money it
made, I never have seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding. As such,
I missed the moment at which America fell in love with Nia Vardalos.
But I do know that since that time, the writer/comic has conducted a clinic
on how not to parlay a breakthrough into a career. Her first move
was to repeat herself on a smaller stage, starring in the knockoff TV series,
My
Big Fat Greek Life. Only after its' failure came her cinematic
follow-up, the cute but forgettable drag comedy Connie and Carla.
After that, she dropped off the scene for five years and now returns with
a film that is more poster tagline than movie: “The Star of My
Big Fat Greek Wedding is finally going to Greece.” Vardalos has
undeniable charm and everywoman appeal, but My Life in Ruins is
an awkward, drab comedy that only occasionally taps into either.
Georgia
(Nia Vardalos) moved from her American home to Greece to become a college
professor in the middle of the history and architecture she loves.
But cutbacks left her without a teaching position, instead falling back
on a job as a tour guide. She's no good at it, looking down on her
customers' lack of interest in academics and generally not a people person.
Her boss (Bernice Stegers) gives Georgia the broken-down bus and the undesirable
tourists while sending the best of everything to the charming Nico (Alistrair
McGowan), who's offered even more perks if he can find a way to get his
“average” fellow guide to quit. Against this backdrop, she embarks
upon yet another Greek tour with a new driver, the heavily bearded, silent
Poupi (Alexis Georgoulis). Her passengers are “Life of the Party”
widower Irv (Richard Dreyfus); clueless Americans Big Al (Harland Williams)
and Kim (Rachel Dratch); a British family made up of demanding Dr. Tullen
(Caroline Goodall), her browbeaten husband (Ian Ogilvy) and their disaffected
daughter (Sophie Stucker); on-the-prowl Italian divorcees Lala (Maria Botto)
and Lena (Maria Adanez); IHOP executive Marc (Brian Palermo); doofus Gator
(Jereb Dauplaise); incoherent Australians Ken (Simon Gleeson) and Sue (Natalie
O'Donnell); and elderly pickpocket Dorcas (Shelia Bernette) and her infirmed
husband Barnaby (Ralph Nossek). As the tour snakes from one Greek
landmark to the next, lessons will be learned, love will bloom, and a pair
of chocolate stains on Georgia's jacket will vary wildly in size and color
from one scene to the next.
I've
traveled on enough bus trips to know that there's a rich mine of comic
potential there, and My Life in Ruins is most successful when it
sticks to the awkward situations that arise from getting a bunch of strangers
together at their most touristy (aka self-absorbed and dim). The
problem is that it's simply not willing to go far enough in making their
trip around Greece a comic disaster or making the characters three-dimensional
enough that we can actually invest in them. From time to time, the
attempts at pathos are simply painful (the less said about their trip to
the Oracle at Delphi, the better, and that goes double for one older character's
sudden miraculous healing), and writer Mike Reiss struggles to pin down
exactly what kind of perfect tour guide he wants Georgia to evolve into.
And because we're ultimately just telling the story of a bunch of people
going around a foreign country, seeing some sites, and buying some ice
cream, my attention was pushed to the limit during long stretches of site
seeing and shopping.
Irv
is the movie's most successful character and Dreyfus gives its' best performance,
even though both his nature (a running gag about him being some kind of
deity screams “I'm left over from an earlier draft where this paid off")
and his fate seem to have been haggled over to the breaking point by rewrites
and test audiences. But by bringing his trademark warmth to a production
that's awfully short on relatable humanity, he probably saves the film
from being true torture. Although Poupi is a totally unbelievable
movie creation (no one alive who cleans up that well would fashion himself
or behave as he does at the beginning, simply so we can be SHOCKED when
he shaves and starts talking), Georgoulis does his best with the
role. Perhaps he's too good: Georgia reacts to him like he's
neither as handsome nor as charming as he actually is, and I do wonder
if Reiss didn't have a less dashing actor in mind. Best of the rest
are the Tullen family: Goodall and Ogilvy make a convincingly brittle
couple and Stucker is able to make her pouty teen sad rather than annoying.
Williams and Dratch make cute all-American imbeciles, while McGowan struts
and puffs up effectively as the villain in the name of being beaten down
at every opportunity.
At
the center of all this, Vardalos has picked a bad day to be a little off
her game (I found her both funnier and more natural in Connie &
Carla) because My Life in Ruins is a full-on star vehicle that's
written and photographed to stop every five minutes or so and mention “You
might remember Georgia as My Big Fat Greek Wedding's Nia Vardalos!”
Funny how utterly artificial the movie's Greece seems even though it was
actually shot there (the ruins, at least, are duly stunning even if the
movie seems to be telling us there's a serious limit to how interesting
we should find them), and how awkward the word “Greek” seems every time
it comes out of the star's mouth, almost as if Reiss was required to use
it at least twice as often as he organically should have. Director
Donald Petrie, the veteran comedy filmmaker who's capable of great things
(the delightful Miss Congeniality, for instance), here presides
over an uneasy tone and whole scenes (like the lethally unfunny opening
at the tour company's offices) that lie there with a vengeance.
There's
also a strange, inexplicable issue at the heart of the screenplay:
that painful opening banter suggests that the company divides tourists
into two groups based entirely upon how desirable they are (or aren't)
as clients, giving the “good” group to Nico and the “bad” one to Georgia.
At every step along the way, Tour A gets the best of everything; a shiny
new bus and the best accommodations. Our heroes' Tour B, meanwhile,
gets to ride around in a rust bucket with no air conditioning and stay
in a dump. The question I kept wondering about was “Did these people
all pay the same price?” And if so, how come nobody sues, or even
complains about it? A single throwaway line could have at least explained
the issue, but instead the movie lazily uses this simple contrivance to
try to turn a bunch of European site seeing tourists into “underdogs”.
It's hardly the only aspect of the movie detached from reality, but certainly
the most glaring.
My
Life in Ruins has its' moments (most involving Dreyfus), but for those
not captivated by Greek scenery and/or its' star, it's a slow, uneventful
journey that generates too few laughs to make up the difference.
I highly recommend that Nia Vardalos try to put some distance between herself
and the Greek Wedding phenomenon she's allowed to define her...
at least after wrapping the upcoming I Hate Valentine's Day, which
reunites her with co-star John Corbett. Variety, as they say, is
the spice of life. |
