The Big Wedding

“Matrimony is God’s greatest gift to his children. It should be sanctified, nurtured, protected against the seeds of dissent.” So says Robin Williams, playing a priest in the star-studded dud The Big Wedding now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

While you might want to nitpick the ‘greatest gift’ declaration – what does that make Jesus? – there’s oodles of truth in his affirming remarks. However, as this atrocious ‘comedy’ persists in doing, Father Moinighan (Williams) demonstrates little else that matches how God calls us to live.

Diane Keaton and Robert De Niro in ‘The Big Wedding’

From jotting down sins committed by the couple to joking about their future children ending up in Hell, legalistic yet kooky Moinighan undermines any truth he speaks by the judgmental way he presents it.

Not that The Big Wedding claims to be a Christian film. Far from it. Starring an eye-catching cast – including Williams, Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon and Katherine Heigl – this absurd, formulaic and crass affair sneers at ‘religious conservatism’. Any whiff of how God might want his ‘greatest gift’ unwrapped and enjoyed is dismissed. Instead, the take-home message seems to be: the right way to love is any way you want.

Don (De Niro) and Ellie (Keaton) are a divorced couple who profanely bicker but, you know, still kinda love each other. Their adopted son Alejandro (Ben Barnes) is getting hitched. His biological mother is Colombian, Catholic – and coming to the wedding. Not wanting his birth-mum to suffer apoplexy upon discovering her boy’s American parents are ‘heathens’, Alejandro asks them to pretend they’re still happily married.

Don’s de facto Bebe (Sarandon) is heartbroken, while Alejandro’s siblings (Heigl and Topher Grace) smirk warmly at the familiar dysfunction. As this fragmented family argues about why they should appear to be what they are not, Ellie attempts to explain Alejandro’s mother: “She’s from another country, a very different country, and her values aren’t the same as ours.”

According to this unfunny, illogical film, these values range from entrenched parent-child disrespect, to mocking pre-marital virginity and teaching offspring to cheapen marriage. Values worth promoting, right? Especially when they lead to Ellie and Don sleeping together. These consequences aren’t a major problem, though. Don reconciling with Bebe simply requires desperate displays of commitment, such as ‘it meant nothing’ excuses.

The Big Wedding wants us to embrace how, ultimately, it’s all good – if we just loosen up, and let ‘sorry; I love you’ whitewash everything. At Alejandro’s wedding, Ellie thanks Moinighan for earlier pointing out ‘there are different kinds of love’. Ellie believes she is feeling ‘all of them’.

How can you feel ‘all’ kinds of love? And why would we want to, if they are like the selfish, chaotic relationships throughout The Big Wedding? Aiming to present love as an unrestricted, tolerant force, The Big Wedding reveals – yet ignores – the un-loving effects that can occur when love is based on what every person believes is the best way to express it.