If the Baptists and Calvinists are right, I will find this film playing in an endless loop in the Afterlife. I will be like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, being forced to consume this painful dreck as payment for all of my sins in this life.
How much do I hate this film? Let me count the ways....
Steve Martin plays the father of a spoiled rotten horror of a daughter who is pulverized by all around him for daring to object to her plans for a monstrously expensive ceremony that would have made the Romanovs blush in their heyday. Diane Keaton plays Diane Keaton, with the same hairstyle and lack of emotional range she showed in every film the appeared in for the better part of three decades, constantly assaulting us with a smile that would make any sane person want to smash her face in with an ice pick.
Martin is condemned by his daughter and wife for daring to even suggest that maybe, just maybe, $250 per plate is a ridiculous expense for what is essentially an afterparty for people who donated a day of their lives to watch people get married. He gets eyerolls and sighs from the people who will NOT be contributing a single dime to the expenses, especially when he suggests that the event planner and his assistant not be included on the guest list. BTW, $250 in 1991 is $661 today.
Unable to get any sympathy- or even the courtesy of a fair hearing- from his family, and being the most disgusting Simp I've ever seen on film, Martin's character goes off to the local grocery store, tears hot dog buns out of their packages because he "only needs" 12 buns to go with his pack of 12 hot dogs, and verbally assaults the minimum-wage workers who question his actions. This guy can't stand up to his ridiculous wife and daughter but he'll blow off steam to customer service people who don't live in huge mansions and don't have to worry about financing over-the-top weddings because they'll never have the bank account to even consider them. He gets arrested and is put into a jail cell, because that's definitely how the the police would handle petty vandalism/theft committed by a rich middle-aged white man in 1991.
When his wife shows up to bail him out, she makes him listen to a lecture first about how "we can afford this wedding" because they don't go to Europe and they don't have fancy cars. Time to apply the ice pick again. Lady, your husband is the only reasonable person in this entire film. It's not about being able to afford this over-the-top spectacle. It's about looking at a situation like a freaking adult and not bending over backwards to accommodate a spoiled, starry-eyed little girl and her enabler hey-it's-not-MY-money mother.
To top it all off, at the end of the film the bride and groom depart the ceremony without even saying goodbye to the Dad who ultimately caved in on every demand and dumped his wallet onto the table so his little girl could be Princess for a Day. I know she comes back and there's a happy ending (though, to my mind, the only happy here is that it Ends*) but long before that happens I don't care anymore because I'm sick of one of my favorite comedians being kicked around by the people who see him as a walking ATM and are annoyed that he opens his mouth to speak when he should just be writing checks. Just, gross.
And I never even got to discuss Martin Short's portrayal of what 1990s audiences figured a gay wedding planner (he's gay because he's male; we all know straight men can't be wedding planners, that would be Gay) would look like. So yeah, it's even slightly worse than I described.
*There's a sequel in which both wife and daughter are pregnant at the same time, which leads to more massive draining of Dad's bank account because Of Course It Does. Even Martin Short is back for some reason. I've never seen it and I never will- unless the endless loop movie in hell is a Double Feature.
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