August 1, 2003
By D.K. Holm
Shit Eating Grin
AMERICAN WEDDING
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
Rarely in the annals of American cinema has there been a film that alternates so wildly between, on the one hand, sweetness and light and the girlish values of boyfriends and marriage and puppies and stuff, and, on the other, absolutely revolting sight gags.
That's what people loved about the first two AMERICAN PIE movies. Reviewers liked to point out the sentimentality and say it's not like PORKY'S, it's obvious progenitor, at all. Instead, it is better than PORKY'S, because it shows emotional sympathy with and understanding of women. As Robin Wood writes in a brilliant essay about teen films in his new book HOLLYWOOD FROM VIETNAM TO REAGAN AND BEYOND (Columbia University Press), AMERICAN PIE, "is very funny, but also very sweet, generous to its characters and with a sort of seductive innocence."
The critics should like this one even better, as the latest oppressed group it shows sympathy for is gays. There was a time when the token gay character in a film was the fragile guy across the hall from the main character who commits suicide when someone finds out he's not really a girl or something. Now we have a teen comedy in which the gay characters are fully integrated into the tale, able to mock and be mocked on par with the other characters. Who says civilization isn't advancing?
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When last we left the group of in AMERICAN PIE 2, they had just finished their first year of college and spent a summer at a resort and were in various states of coupling. Jim Levenstein (Jason Biggs) had realized that the love of his life was Michelle Flaherty (Alyson Hannigan), not foreign exchange student Nadia (Shannon Elizabeth, who doesn't appear in this one). Steve Stifler (Seann William Scott), the Stiffmeister, was in bed with two faux lesbians, and still mad at Paul Finch for fucking his mother at the end of the previous movie, PIE 1. Meanwhile, Finch himself (Eddie Kaye Thomas) was still obsessing over Stifler's robust mom, Jeanine (Jennifer Coolidge), whom we see him with in the final shots. And in the most depressing subplot, Kevin Myers (Thomas Ian Nicholas) had reconciled himself to being "just friends" with Vicky (Tara Reid, also not in this one). So squashed is Kev's soft-boiled dick that he doesn't even figure much in this third film, relegated, like the token black guy in most teen comedies, to the sidelines with vague references to a "girlfriend." Meanwhile Oz (Keanu clone Chris Klein) and Heather (Mena Suvari) were still in each other's arms (they also didn't make the cut for this streamlined third iteration).
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As this film starts, Jim decides to propose to Michelle. Naturally, things don't go as planned … indeed, they never go as planned in this series, which is predicated on Murphy's Law, i.e., if it can go wrong it will, with the amendment that the when things go awry they will do so in the most humiliatingly sexual manner possible.
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More than the first two, this film is structured around elaborate set-ups in which one character after another, or sometimes even all of them at once, find themselves in the most excruciatingly complicated and uncompromising positions. The task of the writers is to come up with these complex set-ups and resolutions, at least five per movie, and each laced with double entendres that seem redundant in a movie as unsubtle as this one (or at least it was the writer's task. This is supposed to be the last in the series. No AMERICAN FAMILY. No AMERICAN BABY). The main visual punchline in the film is the reaction of someone opening a door upon the spectacle of seeming outrages against man, God, and farm animals.
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Here is a list of some of the situations that the kids find themselves in this time around. Jim is caught getting a blowjob from Michelle in a restaurant when he is trying to set up a moment to propose. Later Jim is shaving his testes (more on this later) and blows the small mountain of hair out the window, where it flies into the room where his in-laws to-be are looking at the wedding cake, which is soon ruined.
Stifler, whom no one wants in the ceremony, ends up being the ring bearer. But while trying to impress a girl he accidentally lets a dog eat it. After following the mutt around all day waiting for it to evacuate the object, Stifler finally retrieves the ring, embedded in a dog turd — only to have the paper-wrapped log mistaken for a chocolate truffle which he then has to eat in order to prevent Jim's future mother-in-law from taking it out of his hand. He then has to display an actual shit-eating grin.
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In the most elaborate set-up, Stifler stages a stag party for Jim in Jim's house — when he knows (or thinks) Jim will be away. The dancers, Fraulein Brandi (Amanda Swisten), a French maid with too much lipstick, and Officer Krystal (Nikki Schieler Ziering), a dominatrix with too much lipstick, are provided by Bear (Eric Allen Kramer, Thor in the INCREDIBLE HULK revival TV-movie), a gay guy that Stifler has a run-in with in a Chicago gay bar (I told you the set up was elaborate). It's actually very amusing how quickly Bear becomes a member of the PIE gang — but then, there were so many to replace
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Suffice it to say that once Finch is covered in chocolate and Kevin is tied to a chair, Jim returns unexpectedly with his prospective in-laws, Harold (Fred Willard) and Mary (Deborah Rush). The rest of the scene is like a French farce, with doors and cupboards and closets opening and closing and on-the-fly explanations stutteringly uttered by fast thinking losers. The sequence's ambitions almost make up for the off-notes caused here (and elsewhere in the film) by joke flattening close ups and strange editing cues.
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The credited writer is Adam Herz, the auteur behind the PIE films, and it is a very "goal-oriented" script, right out of a modern screenplay manual. But all the goals here are contrived and only of temporary, plot-convenience importance. Jim wants to surprise Michelle by learning how to dance. He also wants to please Michelle by finding her the wedding gown she wants. Michelle's goal, meanwhile, is to try and memorize the vows she has written for herself. Stickler's goal, one of many, is to replace the wedding flowers he ruined through one of his careless shenanigans.
Aside from Jim and Michelle's goals, the bulk of the plot concerns a competition between Finch and Stifler for Michelle's sister, Cadence (January Jones of FULL FRONTAL and ANGER MANAGEMENT), and after that, the realization of the wedding ceremony itself, which ties up the film's combo of FATHER OF THE BRIDE and MEET THE PARENTS (in fact, WEDDING co-producer Paul Weitz is writing the PARENTS sequel). The leavening of the gross-out humor may in fact come from the Weitz brothers, who also did the sweet natured — and unlikely — ABOUT A BOY (and who are Hollywood Royalty, related to Lupita Tovar, Paul Kohner and Susan Kohner. This film's director is of a different royal line. Jesse Dylan is the son of Bob Dylan, whose previous film is HOW HIGH, also with Fred Willard).
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It probably sounds as if I didn't like the film, but that's not quite true. As with everything else, I have ambivalent feelings about it. The gross and the sweet are inextricably intertwined in this series. I looked around the auditorium during the shit eating scene and the audience was howling with delight, so obviously I am out of tune with the mass American public in not finding this kind of humor particularly funny. Also, I simply didn't get some of the humor, such as Jim's obsession with shaving his privates. Is that something that teens are doing now? Is it embarrassing these days to have body hair? If so, it's all new to me.
But I thought a lot of it was funny, such as when Stifler jumps up at the stag party and excitedly but sternly tells the dominatrix, who was starting to turn nice for a second, "Don't you ever break character again," and Willard's toast at the wedding banquet, when he says to Jim's Jewish parents something like, "And may we sit many happy shivas." I was one of about four people who laughed at that one (shiva is a period of Jewish mourning with various rituals). And Michelle, and/or Alyson Hannigan, may be the perfect American girl, sex-minded and open-hearted. When Jim, contriving to get her into a situation where he can offer her the engagement ring, tells her he wants to do something, her first thought is, "Is it kinky?"
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Yes, all in all the values of AMERICAN WEDDING are congenial. And as Robin Wood says about AMERICAN PIE, something which is also true here, the film "also has a rare supportive father who actually encourages his son's interest in sex, much to the latter's embarrassment."
It's just too bad that AMERICAN WEDDING is so horrible photographed and oft-times clumsily edited. But it won't matter. There are two ways to have a hit movie in America. One is to put the word "wedding" in the title. The other is to put the word "American" in the title. Is there any doubt that AMERICAN WEDDING will be a double hit?
NEXT TIME:BUFFALO SOLDIERS, and/or AMERICAN MASTERS: THE EDUCATION OF GORE VIDAL
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