Theo Angelopoulos, eat your heart out. Here is the Greek cinema sensation that’s storming the United States multiplexes — well, Greek-American cinema sensation, anyway. My Big Fat Greek Wedding is the biggest indie smash since The Blair Witch Project: it’s had couples laughing and swooning with delight in the auditorium and cinema managers cooing with life-affirming pleasure over the till receipts.
Toula (Nia Vardalos) is a plump, plain, second-generation Greek girl from Chicago who falls in love with rugged Anglo-Saxon type Ian, played by John Corbett — best known as Sarah Jessica Parker’s on-again-off-again love interest in Sex and the City. She blossoms; he pops the question, and has to convert to the Greek Orthodox church to please her vibrant, uproarious, food-obsessed extended family who turn up mob-handed to any social event involving the happy couple — including, of course, the big day itself.
It’s enjoyable, with a cracking performance from Michael Constantine as Toula’s father Gus, a robust Greek nationalist who claims that any word in common usage has a Greek root, including “kimono”. “When my people were writing philosophy, your people were swinging from trees,” he brusquely informs his prospective son-in-law — in Greek.
When Gus’s ancient, crone-like mother is brought over from the old country, she gets confused and calls Gus “a bloodthirsty Turk!” thereby opening a modern Hellenic can of worms. “What three important things did the Greeks invent?” Gus asks his children. Astronomy, philosophy and democracy, comes the reply. Incidentally, when Gus’s only son Nick remains single and never seems to have a girlfriend, I wondered if he might be pursuing another activity the ancient Greeks invented, but no — he’s eyeing up the bridesmaids in the last scene with all the other red-blooded young Greek guys.
In truth, the movie looks less novel if you remove “Greek” from the title and replace it with “Jewish” or “Italian”, but it’s still very entertaining. As with the dating comedy Kissing Jessica Stein, it started life as a fringe-theatre piece, and it’s delightful to see its original writer-performer Nia Vardalos play the lead on screen. She looks like a real person: an organic talent — very different from a possible genetically modified casting of, say, Jennifer Aniston. Congratulations to co-producers Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks for developing the project and keeping its flavour.