Muriel's Wedding is the event Muriel
wants so much to happen but fears never will. How is she to feel otherwise
when her frightful best friends insist she surrender a bridal bouquet
she's just caught. "Give it back, give it back," they yap
at her like well-dressed terriers. "Nobody's ever going to marry
you." That scene, which opens P.J. Hogan's marvelous debut film,
sets the tone for what is to come. Wickedly mocking but empathetic,
able to laugh at its characters while paying attention to their sorrows,
this subversive comedy about self-esteem resists the notion that films
have to timidly remain within tidy genre rules.
Played with take-no-prisoners comic enthusiasm by Toni Collette, 22-year-old
Muriel Heslop is the kind of hapless young woman who wears a shoplifted
leopard-skin dress to a wedding--and gets caught by the store detective.
Overweight, with bad skin, a braying laugh and a frighteningly wide
grin, aggressively unattractive Muriel is known locally in Porpoise
Spit for saying and doing the wrong things. Even her taste in music,
her devotion to Abba's bubbly but outmoded melodies, makes her nominal
friends wince. And when it comes to matrimony, Muriel is so in love
with the idea of being married that she is on intimate terms with every
frame of Princess Di's wedding tape. Glassy-eyed and obsessive on the
subject, Muriel looks on a marriage license as a membership card in
the human race that will prove to everyone, herself most of all, that
she has finally become a worthwhile person.
Muriel comes by her insecurities the way most people do, through her
dysfunctional blood relatives. Father Bill Heslop (veteran Australian
actor Bill Hunter), known as "Bill the Battler" to his intimates,
is a politician and influence-peddler whose hobby is running down everyone
in his family, from his catatonic wife, Betty (Jeanie Drynan), to his
horde of professional couch-potato children. But though Muriel takes
her fair share of abuse, she has something rare, and that is spirit.
Though it tends to come out in unhelpful ways, like her weakness for
telling strings of lies, that quality makes Muriel believe that some
day things will go her way. "I know I'm not normal," she says
earnestly, "but I can change."
That passion also makes Muriel defy logic and seriously bend some rules
to accompany her horrified trio of harpy girlfriends when they take
a Club Med-type vacation on Hibiscus Island. There Muriel meets Rhonda
(Rachel Griffiths), a full-bore party animal who truthfully says, "My
whole life is one last fling after another." Unexpectedly, Rhonda
responds to the free spirit in Muriel and the validation of that friendship
proves liberating. It starts Muriel on a wild and chaotic journey of
self-discovery, filled with wacky and eccentric plot turns, that will
gradually cause her to rethink almost all her most cherished ideas.
Clearly, Muriel's Wedding would be much less than it is without
the right stars, and Collette, who has the courage not to shortchange
Muriel's more off-putting qualities, and Griffiths, who looks like a
mature Juliette Lewis and makes Rhonda's character believable, were
both remarkable enough to win Australian Academy Awards. And the rest
of the cast, even an old warhorse like Bill Hunter, completely catches
the spirit of the piece and join forces as a gifted ensemble. The credit
for this has to go to writer-director Hogan and a production team led
by co-producers Lynda House and Jocelyn Moorhouse (who directed the
memorable Proof and is Hogan's wife). They've come up with
a slashing guerrilla attack on accepted notions of marriage, family
and self-improvement that never allows us to forget the doubt that makes
its characters human. Though it is consistently funny, Muriel's
Wedding is savvy enough not to play things just for laughs. —
Kenneth Turan, LA Times
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