A smart 'Four Weddings' recalls vintage Hollywood

Originally published March 18, 1994

When critics start hauling out hoary superlatives like frothy, charming and bubbly, there's a tendency on the part of the reader - at least this reader, and this critic - to think "Uh-oh, innocuous piffle dead ahead."

Four Weddings and a Funeral is frothy, charming and bubbly, as befits a movie whose numerous characters ply themselves with champagne and multi-tiered cakes crowned with bride-and-groom figurines. But it is anything but piffle. Smart and sophisticated, this sublime romantic comedy is at once thoroughly modern and indebted to the vintage antics of a get-me-to-the-church-on-time Hollywood farce.

As directed by Mike Newell (Enchanted April, Into the West) and written by Richard Curtis (The Tall Guy, TV's Blackadder), the picture is a five-acter bravely built around the ceremonies of its title: Rites of passage that bring disparate groups together for drunken revelries, flirtatious flings, rampant gossip and grand displays of foolhardiness.

At the center of all this is Charles, a self-deprecating thirtysomething Brit who remains steadfastly single even as the wedding invitations of fast friends keep coming in the mail. Hugh Grant - who can also be seen currently as the art-critiquing Anglican priest in John Duigan's comedy about sex and repression, Sirens - plays the handsomely disheveled Charles with rakish aplomb. Comparisons to another Grant - Cary - and to David Niven are not out of order. The actor projects a similarly beguiling air of casual panache.

As best man at the first of the film's quartet of matrimonial shindigs, Grant's Charles delivers a toast that is eloquent, witty and a wee bit scandalous. (When a subsequent best man tries to approximate this deft oratorical juggling act, the results are embarrassingly in bad taste. ) Hoisting a champagne glass, Charles confesses that he is "in bewildered awe" of his friends' commitment to marriage - a commitment he finds he cannot apply to his own life.

Watching from the wings is Carrie (Andie MacDowell), an American fashion editor who, like everyone else under the big reception tent, is smitten by Charles' speech. You could draw electric charges, cartoon-style, from Carrie's eyes to Charles' - but thankfully Newell doesn't. (The English filmmaker's style remains playfully but determinedly understated.) Instead, Charles and Carrie meet clumsily, their first encounter followed shortly thereafter by a funny, intimate tryst at a country inn.

Charles and Carrie seem perfect for each other, but his very Englishness - polite, aloof, a bit twitty - and her free-spirited Americanness are not in sync. They know there's something there, and over the course of three more weddings and a funeral the pair struggle painfully, and comically, with their realization. Things culminate with a piece of at-the-altar suspense that will leave you biting your nails. Doth true love win out?

Encircling Charles and Carrie is a merry band of eccentrics (a couple of them a mite too merry and eccentric: If the film has a flaw, it is in the forced bonhomie of a couple of the supporting roles). There's Charles' bohemian roommate, Scarlett (Charlotte Coleman), forever looking for her Rhett; there is Fiona (Kristin Scott Thomas), another of his platonic female friends; there are all of Charles' ex-girlfriends, and there is his brother (David Bower), whose deafness, at several points, results in timely and hilarious episodes of miscommunication.

As she's demonstrated in Green Card and the underappreciated The Object of Beauty, MacDowell is an actress of blithe and beaming radiance (even her teeth seem to glow). She projects a mix of earthy humor and cosmopolitan charm, and in Four Weddings and a Funeral MacDowell is handed another opportunity to play a sharp, seductive, unpredictable woman with great hair and clothes. That there is something coy and subtly calculating about her character here only makes her that much more real.

Four Weddings and a Funeral is one of those rare films that have you smiling from the get-go, and keep you that way - with a few well-earned poignant interludes (including, of all things, a reading of W.H. Auden) - right to the end. RSVP immediately.