Cinema: Fabius Burger
THE producer of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Duncan Kenworthy, said during filming that weddings were universal, then ran out of financing. Polygramme Filmed Entertainment and Channel Four, usually accused of financing only politically correct dramas about socially-loaded trisexual love affairs, came to the rescue. Surprise! The film was the biggest international box-office hit since A Fish Called Wanda.
The critics got snooty: the film was a sitcom, was hostile to weddings and did zilch for the film industry.
Kenworthy’s reaction was puzzlement about negative attitudes to a commercial hit. One has to agree with him. The movie, about Sloane-Londoner Charles (Hugh Grant), who falls in love with and woos the American, Carrie (Andy MacDowell), through four weddings and a funeral, is good entertainment and, despite its flimsy reliance on comedy conventions for plot, has a lot more substance than a string of one liners.
The weddings are done with a tart, but humorous, eye for the characters’ foibles and quirks. These ceremonies are bitchy, sympathetic and, at times, moving, especially when the gay Matthew (John Hannah) pays tribute to his late lover with Auden’s poem Stop all the Clocks, Cut off the Phone, and provides a human centre to the movie.
Still, director Newell probably sums everything up when he said he found the script at first “preposterous” but then “very funny”, and “honestly, it’s nothing more complicated than that”. Agreed. Go and see it, but beware — you could enjoy it.