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Your support makes all the difference.A wedding comedy called The Big Wedding doesn't look likely to prize the virtues of wit or invention, though somehow it has managed to bolster its puny credentials with a top-drawer cast.
Adapted from a French farce Mon Frère Se Marie, it stars Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton as Don and Ellie, a long-divorced couple who are reuniting at his Connecticut mansion for the nuptials of their adopted son (Ben Barnes).
Because the latter's birth mother is a severely traditional Catholic, Don and Ellie pretend they're still married, a subterfuge that doesn't play well with Bebe (Susan Sarandon), the woman Don has been living with for years.
Their grown-up children arrive with boring burdens of their own: Katherine Heigl is on the run from a wobbly marriage and fertility issues, while Topher Grace is an ER doctor who's still (inexplicably) a virgin at 29.
Writer-director Justin Zackham has spiked his script with risqué sexual jokes and crude language, as if to say, hell, this isn't your average schmaltzy wedding laugh-in. Except that it is – actually, worse than average – and having De Niro play a randy old goat mortifies him as well as the audience.
Similarly, when the bride and groom introduce their families at a fancy restaurant, is it amusing that the ice-breaker concerns Keaton's nine-hour tantric orgasm? Or that a near-stranger starts fiddling with Topher Grace's trousers? (You can sort of tell it's from the French.)
Keaton starred in a generational comedy of comparable inadequacy with Jack Nicholson about 10 years ago (Something's Gotta Give). While she looks terrific at 68, maturity has done nothing for her ability to pick a movie.
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