Having seen enough trailers and expecting yet another rom-com centered around yet another potentially disastrous minefield of a wedding, I was actually pleasantly surprised to find that The Big Wedding has a bit of substance to it. Sure, there's the usual plot devices, but there's also some deeper struggles here that make shoving this in a small, tidy box a grave injustice. Various relationships are strained and tenuous, as it is with many families, and the story doesn't shy away from that.
The Big Wedding has a giant ensemble cast that actually works fairly well together. No one person's performance was super remarkable, but they function well together as a team and seem believeable as a family even if they clearly don't resemble one another. In terms of the story, past events in the family are never explicitly laid out, but enough is available to draw a fairly detailed picture of what occured. Writer/director Justin Zackham apparently (and thankfully) believes that viewers actually possess enough brainpower to draw their own conclusions, which I appreciate.
The plot is simple: one of the sons (Barnes) is marrying at the family home and wishes to bring his biological mother from Colombia. She's a devout Catholic and believes that divorce is a grave and mortal sin, so his adoptive parents (who are in fact divorced) must act as if they are married for the weekend, even though they have both moved on, and his dad (De Niro) is in a committed relationship. Obviously, this doesn't go over too well within the family.
Some of the most hilarious scenes occur when the family interacts with the priest (Williams). I'm not sure how much of his lines were ad-libbed, but I don't know how the actors managed to keep a straight face. Strangely, it's through some of the more randomly absurd interactions that strained relationships between various family members end up becoming healed"”or they are at least set on the right path to communicating like actual adults.
If you're feeling particularly brave, this could be a date night movie"”I wouldn't do this for the first date though. The Big Wedding is teeming with sexual innuendo and inappropriate comments everywhere that may or may not go over so well in mixed company. But it's a better bet than any Nicholas Sparks movie could ever hope to be.
