Four Weddings and a Funeral

Hugh Grant - Charles
Andie MacDowell - Carrie
John Hannah - Matthew
Kristin Scott - Thomas Fiona
Simon Callow - Gareth
James Fleet - Tom
David Bower - David
Charlotte Coleman - Scarlett
Rowan Atkinson - Father Gerald

There is a lot of truth in the advertising of the British comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral. This is a film that is about 80% happiness and 20% pain. Hugh Grant plays Charles, a bachelor who tells himself that he is looking for a wife but is too indecisive and unwilling to commit to any one woman. So he goes to wedding after wedding getting increasingly desperate and frustrated. One after another marriage picks off members of Charles's group of close-knit friends.

The group is centred around the flamboyant Garath, played superbly by Simon Callow. Both the character and the actor are incorrigible scene stealers, upstaging everybody else in sight. Charles has flitted from woman to woman without ever deciding on one. The only woman really close to him is Scarlett who is a fraternal friend. However Charles's latest interest is in a visiting American, Carrie (Andie MacDowell) who seems to be going to the same weddings. Charles finds Carrie very attractive -and is often tongue-tied in her presence - and almost would be willing to commit to her. The two exchange intimacies of various kinds but neither can really decide to marry the other.

This film is a portrait of Charles and as with many painted portraits, most of the interest is in the background. Charles's friends may well have more interesting stories to tell than Charles does. The film lets you do some jigsaw puzzle work to piece together the stories of some of the friends. The script was written by Richard Curtis, one of the founding forces of British TV's "Black Adder" series. Here his writing combines the slapstick of that show's style with more subtle personal drama. Everybody's worst nightmares about just what could go wrong at a wedding combine with visual gags, dialogue gags, and even subtitle gags.

Hugh Grant is boyish and pleasant enough but not always believable as Charles (He is the current holder of the Anthony Hopkins Ubiquity Award for simultaneously being in this film, in Sirens and in Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon, Of course some of us will remember him best as a gay Cantabrigian in Maurice or a kilted Scot in Lair of the White Worm). Ironically, Andie MacDowell is central to the story without having much of a role except to look attractive. Scarlett, the friend, is actually a more intriguing role than is Carrie. But the plum role, of course, is Garath, whose boisterous love of life makes him the focal point of so much of the film.

This is a decidedly lightweight film but well made and one that has occasionally very funny gags. It possess humour, good dialogue, people the audience care about, all to tell a story with just a wisp of a plot. With a genuine plot this could have been a really outstanding film.
Review© Mark R. Leeper.