Wedding not worth RSVP

Michael van den Bos

The film The Wedding Date stars Debra Messing, the popular Jewish comedic actor from Will and Grace, as Kat, a pretty, single New Yorker who is anxious about attending her spoiled, self-absorbed, half-sister's wedding in London without a gorgeous date. She hires Nick, played by Dermot Mulroney, a high-priced male escort (read, hooker) to pretend (read, lie to her friends and family) to be her handsome and smart boyfriend. All this wasted energy and thousands of dollars to prove she is happy (read, pathetic) and to torture her loser, ex-boyfriend who is the best man to the groom (read, don't waste your time).

The Wedding Date is trying to be a frothy, witty romantic comedy in the tradition of My Best Friend's Wedding and Four Weddings and a Funeral. It wants to be a sparkling Dom Perignon but it tastes like flat ginger ale. The central conceit of a modern, urban woman obsessed with deluding her family, friends and ex-lover into believing she's a happy, self-actualized woman by hiring a hooker to pose as her soulmate is not only dumb, but will insult any woman with an IQ higher than their blouse size.

As Nick, Mulroney looks handsome, is well educated (he took comparative literature at Brown University, yeah right) and spouts sage advice to various flailing characters like a $1,000-a-night Yoda. Mulroney exhibits no charm, no sex appeal and no presence. He's a stud somnambulist in Hugo Boss threads.
Messing is a very talented comic actress. She deserves better material than this flaccid date. In Will and Grace she has a giddy, slightly goofy charm that is winsome and spiky all at once. In her co-starring role in Woody Allen's Hollywood Ending, she proved adept, light and absolutely winning at screwball comedy. But in Allen's picture, she had a master comic writer and director guiding her. In The Wedding Date Messing shows zero spark in her performance. Her character is an idiot and entirely unsympathetic. Director Clare Kilner directs with all the comic panache and dexterity of a tax auditor. Dana Fox's anachronistic script should have been annulled before being given the green light.

In a romantic comedy, you must have characters you like and they must have chemistry mixed with an absolutely key component, sexual tension. The only tension reflected off the screen will be audiences wishing they didn't RSVP to this wedding.

Michael van den Bos has been a film and television producer for 18 years. He teaches film theory at the Vancouver Film School and is a freelance writer about cinema.

^TOP