Bridal bore
Mark Steyn
The Wedding Planner is a dandy romantic comedy circa 1955 that for some reason has taken half a century to make it to the screen. As a result the brisk but perky career gal is played not by Doris Day but by Jennifer Lopez, and the down to earth guy engaged to someone unsuitable is played not by Gig Young but by Matthew McConaughey. This casting is somewhat less satisfactory but, if you make movies 40 years after their sell-by date, that's an occupational hazard. Miss Lopez plays Mary, a
cellphone-laden headsetted wedding planner able to marshal vast hordes of underlings to ensure that your bridal event is truly magical. Early on, a long tracking shot follows our heroine as she tweaks a bridesmaid's cleavage, sorts out an incontinent preacher and sobers up the father of the bride: all in a day's work. But whether Mary will ever know her own bridal event is a more fraught question. She seems destined to be always the wedding planner, never the wed.
And then one day she meets Dr Steve Edison (McConaughey). The moment of meeting — the 'meet cute', as they say in Hollywood — is worth lingering over. Mary gets her heel caught in a manhole cover. Suddenly, a garbage truck starts rolling towards her. Dr Steve pushes Mary out of the way. Though the truck does not hit her, the flying Steve manages to land on top of her. I have tried to describe this scene as dully as possible, yet I feel I still have not done justice to the sheer inert rhythmless torpor of it. It's not just that it's terribly written, by Pamela Falk and Michael Ellis, but that the director, Adam Shankman, in mistaking the script for a masterpiece, only makes things worse.
Picking themselves up and dusting themselves off, Mary and Steve then proceed to enjoy the perfect evening together. Mary is in love — just like all her clients! But then her well-heeled daddy's-girl client Fran (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras) introduces Mary to her own fiance, who turns out to be Dr Steve Edison. Mister Right has already found his Mrs Right, and to make things worse Mary has to plan their wedding. Now in real life this wouldn't be the stuff of romance: if Steve deliberately strung Mary along on that date, he's a heel. If it was genuinely love at first sight, he owes it to Fran to call off the meeting. But that way you wouldn't have a movie. You certainly wouldn't have a movie like My Best Friend's Wedding, which The Wedding Planner follows with an almost slavish devotion.
I was never too fond of My Best Friend's Wedding, but at least it had an amusing gay, and Cameron Diaz singing Burt Bacharach. Lacking such delights, Planner substitutes a couple of set-pieces which make the manhole scene look like a work of genius. For example, while in a sculpture garden, Mary and Steve accidentally break off an unfortunate statue's meat and two veg. Happily, Mary has some glue in her handbag for just such an occasion, Unhappily, the old wedding tackle accidentally gets stuck to Steve's hand. You assume the movie's gone to all this trouble to set the gag up — to get the penis on to his hand — because it's going to run with it, set up all kinds of crazy jokes involving his weird growth. But perish the thought. Instead. Mary gets some glue remover out of her handbag, and whips the offending genitals off the hand. But not before we've all concluded that this is a movie whose balls are in the wrong place.
Miss Wilson-Sampras is well cast as the pouting high-maintenance rich gal. But Planner suffers grievously from its lethargic principals. Matthew McConaughey, a much-hyped non-star star, turns in an enervated performance that kills the picture: he looks like a bored guest at a dull party. Julia Roberts wasn't exactly wild and abandoned in illy Best Friend's Wedding, but Jennifer Lopez gives a cold turn: her every glance seems to say 'Don't come near me. Or, if you do, don't touch my clothes.' J Lo, as she's known, has been all over the papers recently as the girlfriend of Puff Daddy, the superstar rapper recently acquitted of charges arising from a nightclub shooting. Miss Lopez evidently leads an interesting and varied life. She seems to look on this movie as a chance to catch up on her sleep.
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