Wedding films usually end with a serving of mushy feelings - The People We Hate at the Wedding fails to deliver the usual dollop of feel-good.Įloise herself is the least interesting character. Thus the importance of family, no matter how messed up its members are, is a key theme, but it comes off as a sentimental afterthought. The character desperately wants to reunite her clan, a sentiment Eloise shares due to a rocky incident the previous summer. While Donna is funny (Janney is an ace comic), her role is probably the least interesting, partly because it is so superficial. We also learn little about Eloise’s relationship with her stepfather, let alone how she feels about her own womanizing father. How has death affected this family? We hear that his demise caused some rifts, but it doesn’t make sense to go light on such a major plot point. Perhaps the novel doesn’t let this omission go, but in the film it feels odd. Donna’s second husband, as well as Alice and Paul’s father, has passed away, a detail that is mentioned but never elaborated on. All three are a hot mess: Paul fears that his boyfriend has grown bored with him, Alice is having an affair, and Donna wolfs down weed gummies (five, to be exact) in order to make it on the plane. This wedding centers on Eloise (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), a wealthy British socialite who invites her American half-brother Paul (Ben Platt), half-sister Alice (Kristen Bell), and kooky mum Donna (Allison Janney) to her upcoming nuptials. The latest entry in the matrimonial demolition derby competition is The People We Hate at the Wedding, based on the novel by Grant Grinder. Hollywood matrimonial fare would have us believe - or project - otherwise, thus the overpopulated genre of the wacky wedding-adjacent comedy. The only wedding I have been to where a riot nearly broke out is when the food at the reception ran out (shortly followed by the alcohol).
In real life, of course, most of these disasters do not occur (though the bachelorette debacle is plausible). Someone will get into a fist fight in the middle of the rehearsal dinner. Someone will inevitably ruin the bachelorette party by handing out too many shots. Someone among the guests will say they love the bride at the worst possible time. There are no Hollywood comedies about weddings without an epic catastrophe.
Kristen Bell, Allison Janney and Ben Platt in The People We Hate at the Wedding Photo:Amazon Studio.
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