The Big Wedding is muddled, off-putting, and not nearly as bad as you’re expecting

As society changes, perspectives change. Customs and expectations shift as cultural changes occur; the idea of divorce may have been considered beyond the pale decades ago, but is now commonplace. The most virulent racists and bigots used to be free to spout their hatred and were never reprimanded; they still exist, but their hatred tends to be more subtle and more insidious. But some things haven’t changed that much. A wedding between two young people is still an important milestone for any family, theoretically a time for celebration, but when everyone gets together … sometimes they can’t hide the secret resentments hiding beneath.

The Big Wedding is an odd sort of movie. We immediately begin with Ellie (Diane Keaton) accidentally seeing her ex-husband Don (Robert De Niro) in flagrante with Bebe (Susan Sarandon), Don’s longtime girlfriend and the one he cheated on his wife with. So it now seems like a silly, screwball comedy of errors right? This is backed up by meeting Ellie and Don’s biological children Jared (Topher Grace) and Lyla (Katherine Heigl) as we discover that he’s a twenty-nine old doctor who’s still a virgin because he’s … wait for it … holding out for love! Their adopted brother Alejandro (Ben Barnes, who isn’t technically Hispanic at all) is getting married to Missy (Amanda Seyfried). And uh oh! In order to convince his biological mother and sister to come from Colombia, Alejandro lied to her that his parents were still married. Sounds like a screwball comedy so far. Not so fast. Because this movie is about to change its mind. And then again. And again.

The movie doesn’t know how to feel. It’ll throw a ridiculous screwball comedy scene scaled up to “adult” levels with increased levels of profanity and vulgarity, then shift suddenly to a weighty scene with legitimate sincerity and mature themes. With subplots that are at times troubling, sad, or silly, the movie gets jumbled about until a very unsatisfying ending with the most predictable resolutions possible to all conflicts. When you mix an R-rated joke with a verbal aside about someone overusing plastic surgery, it seems out of place. But even with all this confusion, there are some legitimately good scenes of acting. Robert De Niro seems shockingly not be phoning it in, although just like the rest of the movie, his characterization is inconsistent. Diane Keaton and Susan Sarandon seem to be playing archetypes of themselves, although it’s decent enough. Katherine Heigl has her first decent character in a while (despite the terrible way the movie ends), although Topher Grace is kind of insufferable. As for the happy couple, Amanda Seyfried and Ben Barnes are basically just the straight people reacting to everyone else being nuts, which seems a bit of a waste for their talents.

It ends up feeling like kind of a mess of a movie, with both good parts, a few laughs, and a lot of cringe-worthy moments. Too many, really. The real problem is all these mature themes that the movie begins to address before settling for more silliness. When the movie is that tonally inconsistent, it’s hard to really have a good time, because you don’t know how to feel — the movie is emotionally confusing, so it makes you feel emotionally confused. The building blocks were there for something better, but it’s still not as bad as it could have been by any means.