Australian director PJ Hogan’s delightful Muriel’s Wedding won him a ticket to Hollywood as the “camp and wedding” guy. His first US flick was My Best Friend’s Wedding, followed by the deplorable turkey Unconditional Love. Hogan’s most recent film was Peter Pan. He seems to have a habit of taking one cast member from each film into his next project, forming a fun, mini-six degrees game. Rachel Griffiths from Muriel’s Wedding appeared in My Best Friend’s Wedding, Rupert Everett from that film starred in Unconditional Love, which also starred Lynn Redgrave, who played Aunt Millicent in Peter Pan.
Muriel’s Wedding remains, for me, the great Australian film, so it’s a shame that Hogan’s talents have devolved since he moved to the States. My Best Friend’s Wedding isn’t a bad film at all, but it lacks all the quirk and heart that made Muriel such a classic.
Julianne Potter (Julia Roberts) is a New York food critic who’s bum chums with her gay editor George (Everett). When she hears that her best friend and ex-boyfriend Michael (Dermot Mulroney) is about to get married, she flies into a panic, fearing she’s lost the love of her life to another woman. She heads to Chicago to confess her love for Michael and stop the wedding, but once she meets Michael’s gorgeous and friendly fiancé Kimberly (Cameron Diaz) she realises she has her work cut out for her.
The plot is artificially thickened by a number of excruciatingly awkward sequences that include Julianne sneaking into Kimberly’s father’s office and sending fake emails, and a runaway chase in a catering truck. It’s the kind of frothy story Doris Day or Audrey Hepburn would have lit up, but toothy Julia Roberts lacks the bright-eyed charm of her matinee idol predecessors. As the apparently schizophrenic Julianne, Roberts isn’t convincing as a poised food critic or an immature bunny boiler and she is charisma-d right off the screen by supernova Diaz, who leapfrogged over this hit right into There’s Something About Mary superstardom.
In the film’s opening, we watch Roberts taste a meal at a restaurant, then deliver her verdict. This rail-thin Hollywood actress clearly knows nothing about food and the too-convenient script feeds her nauseating and unrealistic dialogue. Julianne appears to write for a top-notch New York magazine, but the only publication this dopey character could believably write for would be the high school newsletter. And something about Julia Roberts appearance just isn’t right – despite make up and lighting, she’s very pasty in most of this film and always looks a moment away from sleep. That dry, knotted hair doesn’t help much either and her character here is so unsympathetic and shrill that all we do is hope like hell for the whole movie that she ends up with no one so she can get a good night’s rest. She was better as the busty, hearty Erin Brokovich.
As for Everett, he was said to be this close to snagging a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his role in this film. The scene where he leads the table in a rendition of “I Say A Little Prayer” was replayed around the clock on talk shows and hyper-jumped Everett into American fame. This is the film that established Everett as Hollywood’s bankable millennial posh/homo/euro, a lucrative mantle he still enjoys today, voicing a main role in Shrek 2. With the American gay identity in post-AIDS tatters, it made sense that Everett, a foreigner, come in to save the day. With his British accent and eccentric, Prince Charles meets David Beckham demeanour, Everett was the perfect actor to play fin de siècle gay as he was American style, but not actually American. Fun and camp in a pre-AIDS way and free of association with most of a decade’s worth of plague, activism and debate.
My Best Friend’s Wedding is fairly watchable but pales in comparison to, say, Four Weddings and a Funeral or even The Wedding Singer, American Wedding, Monsoon Wedding or My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Roberts' Julianne is completely unlikeable, the object of her affection is fairly undesirable, and someone on the screenwriting team forgot to write the film a second act.
