Wedding Crashers

Wedding crashers is an amiable guilty pleasure film for the adults. The film is full of nudity and crude language and revels in two men who act like oversexed frat boys on spring break. Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn star in Wedding Crashers a ludicrous romp of two best buddies whose greatest joy in life is to crash weddings and pick up vulnerable hot women at weddings for casual flings. For once Wilson plays the straight man, the lonely heart who falls for an unavailable nice girl and woos her with a combination of comedy and deception. Any film in which Owen Wilson plays the straight man must be an all out laugh fest. Vaughn on the other hand is a warped individual whose depravity comes back to visit him fourfold when he becomes involved with the wacky daughter of a senator.

Wedding Crashers is a fun and mindless film that though it may strive to be more than it is, is none the less and enjoyable film. Just as Bill Murray, Rick Moranis, John Candy, and Dan Akroyd seemed to inhabit a world of zany comedies in the early 1980s; in the 2000s we see a string of successful films with the likes of Will Farrell, Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, and Vince Vaughn. Wedding Crashers follows in the tradition of Old School though it mixes it with the more sentimental and better written fare like The Wedding Singer. The R rating was fairly arbitrary, take out two scenes and the film could pass as a raucous PG-13 which might have made more money but it is really a tossup. Rating a comedy R, brings up the grand tradition of films like Stripes and Something About Mary and reclasses the film above the humdrum mediocrity without so much as showing a scene.

Wilson’s John Beckwith is losing his game, having difficulty focusing on the juvenile chase and desiring more out of his life than just being the life of the party and bedding hot women. But of course he aids his friend to crash the wedding of the season of Secretary Cleary’s (Christopher Walken) oldest daughter. Now as these things go, the Secretary has two other daughters, one deranged daughter for Jeremy, and one perfectly amiable and amusing daughter for John. The two get dragged to a picturesque coastal Maryland yachting town to stay with the family for the weekend where John tries to get nice girl Clair alone away from her alpha male boyfriend Sack, played with aplomb by the up and coming Bradley Cooper. Meanwhile Jeremy suffers degradation and humiliation from the rest of the family on his friend’s behalf while hoping only to escape.

The film is fun and funny and dirty and a perfect summer confection, well written, humorously acted and enjoyable. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the buddy relationship between Wilson and Vaughn where the wingman suffers immense humiliations to cover his friend’s back and win the day. The duo may be immature, but they care about each other if not most of the women they bed, and it is their friendship that makes them endearing far more than the somewhat manipulative love story concocted between John and Clair the middle daughter of the senator. The best part is that these guys don’t crash weddings dragging them down in their pursuit of women; they become the life of the parties and enhance each of the weddings. Of course what a bride is going to say when half of her pictures include a stranger cutting the cake may be different, but the duo seem to bring diversion and amusement to every party in a non-destructive manner.

The setup and execution are fairly familiar and comfortable. Wilson gets to be sweet and charming and lie through his teeth while Vaughn chews up the scenery suffering one mortification after another and trying to buoy his flagging energies to remain at his friend’s side. What is fun about the film is to see how his irreverent humor is put to a stiff upper middle class family with more issues than even Freud could deal. There is the unfaithful boozing mother played by Jane Seymour who looks great but could have been given more to do. There is Christopher Walken playing a much warmer role than he has played in a long time as a doting father. Walken plays the senator as a surprisingly down to earth head of an entirely unusual clan. They pursue all of the Waspish pursuits, a weekend on the water, football in the yard, quail hunting, formal family dinners; all while pursuing their own deviant desires.

Most importantly is the chemistry, not between Wilson and McAdams but between Wilson and Vaughn. Since the two actors seem to live in a world of buffoon comedy that they work together so well seems like a given, but the give and take between the two best friends is convincing enough to give the comedy the emotion it needs to carry it through the necessary estrangement times. These two seem to truly like each other and so their falling out is that much more effective. At the end whether they get the girl seems less important than whether the two of them are back together as friends.

So put your mind on hold and enjoy the ride. Just remember to leave the kiddies at home for this one. In the grand tradition of buddy films and of raunchy comedies like Caddyshack and There’s Something About Mary, Wedding Crashers is a shamefully exuberantly good time.