A WEDDING (1978) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Robert Altman
Carol Burnett, Paul Dooley, Geraldine Chaplin,
Mia Farrow, Amy Stryker, Desi Arnaz Jr.,
Dina Merrill, Vittorio Gassman, Lauren Hutton,
John Considine, Lillian Gish, John Cromwell,
Pat McCormick, Howard Duff, Pam Dawber,
Nina Van Pallandt, Dennis Christopher, Viveca Lindfors,
Peggy Ann Garner, Bert Remsen, Dennis Franz
This isn't Robert Altman's best movie, but it might be his most stereotypical: a comic ensemble piece in which 48 characters mill about and bump into each other at an upscale wedding reception. That's a few more characters than even an Altman movie can reasonably accommodate, so what you get is mostly a collection of cameos. Some of these are eccentric, and sometimes there's not much there. Carol Burnett and Paul Dooley are the bride's parents. Nina Van Pallandt and Vittorio Gassman are the parents of the groom. Mia Farrow's the bride's weird sister (and, boy, is she weird). Geraldine Chaplin's the compulsively organized wedding planner. John Cromwell plays a doddering bishop. Lillian Gish is the family matriarch, who expires just as the party's getting started and spends the rest of the film as a corpse. Nobody's entirely likeable, and the whole enterprise plays out on the principle that weddings, as the most emotionally charged and rigorously stage-managed social events on earth, are disasters waiting to happen. The effect, watching it, is like being a bystander at a big formal family bash, where you don't really know anybody and don't really want to, but the booze is free and the food is good and maybe somebody's sharing a joint somewhere, so you hang around just to see what funny little humiliating incident you'll be spying on next. Did I mention that this is Altman at his most cynical? That, too.
Dina Merrill
(1923-2017)
