Marriage lines
Mark Steyn
y Big Fat Greek Wedding is a Greek comedy. I don't mean Aristophanes. but rather a comedy about being Greek. In America, it opened very low-key in April and it's still in theatres right now, the intervening summer blockbusters having come and gone leaving nary a trace. But My Big Fat Greek Wedding has been such a big fat hit that some TV network is planning a TV sitcom based on it, under the amended title Aly Big Loud Greek Wedding, the implication that Greeks are loud being apparently less offensive than that they're fat. These are difficult days for ethnic comedy.
We have Tom Hanks to thank for this one. His wife, Rita Wilson. is Greek-American apparently and decided she and Tom simply had to bring this story to the screen after she saw its writer, Nia Vardalos, perform it as a monologue at Chicago's Second City theatre company. Ifs based on Miss Vardalos's experiences growing up Greek in Winnipeg. Hollywood kept the Greek, junked the Winnipeg. It's now about growing up Greek in Chicago. One is mindful of the late Hugh MacLennan's pithy summation of the average New York publisher's response to submissions from Canadian novelists: 'Boy meets girl in Winnipeg. Who cares?' MacLennan would be heartened to know that, even in a project selling itself on ethnic authenticity, Canadians remain beyond the pale. Incidentally, although the story's been moved from Winnipeg to Chicago, it was filmed in Toronto. But then again that could sum up the entire genre: whatever its nominal setting, the ethnic comedies all seem to emanate from one bland central location. Only the set dressing changes.
So meet Toula Portokalos (played by Miss Vardalos), a `seating hostess' at her dad's restaurant. Dancing Zorba's. She's `over 30 and way past my expiration date', because, as she explains, all Greek women are put on earth to 'marry Greek men, make Greek babies and feed everyone till the day we die'. One day a young man walks in. Can you guess what he'll be? Well, he won't be Greek, that's for sure. And it's a pretty safe bet he'll be a Wasp, probably from some uptight white-bread family.
And by golly he is! Miss Portakalos, meet Ian Miller (John Corbett, from Sex And The City). They love each other, but there's a problem. Can you guess what it is? `No one in our family has ever gone out with a non-Greek,' explains Toula. Their AngloGreek romance will cause great divisions in the family.
Beware of Greeks baring rifts. In Miss Vardalos's performance, there are glimpses of the show as it must have played at Second City: you can see in her timing that she knows this material inside out, where the set-up is, where the laughs fall. Some of the jokes are cute: I like the moment when she introduces Ian to a few of her cousins — "Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nicky, and Gus'. But whatever eye for detail the author demonstrated in the original isn't much in evidence now it's been through the Hollywood airbrushing process and crassly directed as one long sitcom episode by Joel Zwick. Here's Toula's mom's reaction to the new boyfriend: 'End it now.'
'But I love him,' says Toula.
`Toula,' says her mother, 'eat something.'
That's generic ethnic. Works just as well for Italians or Jews. Indeed, Lainie Kazan's performance as Toula's Greek momma Maria is indistinguishable from her performance as the Jewish momma in My Favourite Year, and she and Michael Constantine (as Toula's theek-accented dad) are a virtual template of Hollywood ethnic. As for Ian's family, everything you need to know is summed up in one shot of the wedding — Toula's vast clan spilling out of every pew on her side of the church, while on the groom's side Ian's handful of kin sit primly in the first four rows.
Don't ask me why there's only one ethnic comedy plot. Eighty years ago, Abie's Irish Rose, the longest-running Broadway play of the 1920s, at least figured out you could double the laughs by giving us two wacky ethnic minorities: Jewish boy meets Irish girl. Maybe My Big Fat Greek Wedding would have been more fun if Ian was a Turk or a Macedonian. Or maybe they could just run Ian in one sequel after another: My Big Fat Belgian Wedding, My Big Fat Danish Wedding. Same uptight anglo, insert new ethnic minority here. Personally, I'd love to see a comedy in which an emotionally repressed Italian marries into a warm big-hearted outgoing family of New England Wasps.
Perhaps the problem is that by the time an ethnic minority becomes established enough to attract the attention of Hollywood it's no longer that ethnic. I met a young Kazakh lady in Washington a while back, and I can't help feeling that the jokes in My Big Fat Kazakh Wedding would be a lot less predictable. One reason why Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding is so much richer and more distinctive than this is that the community it portrays still sits a little apart from the mainstream culture it co-exists with. Maybe the Speccie's favourite ambassador, Ghazi Algosaibi, should knock off a quick treatment for My Big Fat Wahhabi Wedding.
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