Bride Wars
Rated: PG
Runtime: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Directed by: Gary Winick
Starring:
Kate Hudson - Liv
Anne Hathaway - Emma
Bryan Greenberg - Nate
Chris Pratt - Fletcher
Steve Howey - Daniel
Kristen Johnston - Deb
Michael Arden - Kevin
Candice Bergen - Marion St. Claire
I expected to downright loathe Bride Wars. It's from 20th Century Fox (their track record speaks for itself) and it looked to reinforce a misogynistic stereotype that women care more about weddings than friendships. So I was surprised that I didn't hate it. Didn't like, but I didn't hate it. I didn't walk out. I rarely rolled my eyes and I even found myself laughing on a few occasions.
Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Liv (Kate Hudson) are lifelong friends who are desperate to get married—well, that's not exactly accurate. They're desperate to have a wedding. The marriage part is a bonus but you get the feeling that even if they didn't love their boyfriends, they'd still say yes to a marriage proposal. This wedding-madness of the first act would seem vapid and sad but the actresses sell it with passion and passion isn't sad. It's actually pretty sexy. When they get pumped about their wedding, I couldn't help but be charmed. But that's not conflict and you can't make a movie without conflict. Thus comes the dumbest problem imaginable: a scheduling conflict that forces these two friends to start destroying each other since neither will take their dream wedding anywhere other than the Plaza Hotel. This is a big problem because it means that as close as these friends are supposed to be (and Hathaway and Hudson do sell that friendship in the first act), their perfect wedding isn't about who gets to be Maid-of-Honor or sharing their special day with their lifelong friend. What's most important is location, location, location!
The film tries to couch their motives in silly, dime-store psychoanalysis (Emma is a pushover who refuses to be pushed over on this and Liv has to have everything perfect because then she won't die like her parents did when she was a kid) and while I applaud the attempt, it doesn't save what ends up wounding the film—the petty feud between these two women. The feud does offer up some nice comedy but eventually the film just starts to drag on as they find more wacky ways to destroy each other. The film spends so much time with their fighting that when it finally remembers that these two had a friendship spanning a couple decades, the remorse is overdone and the film drags even more.
Hathaway and Hudson are very good and it's their chemistry that gives the film the energy it needs in the first act to keep the movie strong through the second and third acts where these characters you once liked have now been reduced to pitiful shells. Bride Wars wins a key battle but the war is a stalemate.
Words by
Matt Goldberg
1.9.09