Release Date: February 4, 2005
Starring: Debra Messing, Dermot Mulroney, Amy Adams, Jack Davenport, Sarah Parish, Jeremy Sheffield, Peter Egan, Holland Taylor
Directed by: Clare Kilner
Written by: Dana Fox
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (sexual content including dialogue)
As romantic comedies go, The Wedding Date is more or less harmless. Its sense of self importance is relatively in proportion with its star power -- that is, this is a movie that knows it stars Dermot Mulroney and Debra Messing and not Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, even if it has sort of pinched its plot from a movie that did -- and any of its temporary excesses can be easily forgiven because it’s short (only a hair over 90 minutes) and because it features a lot of good looking British scenery. In fact, at times, you may find yourself wishing for something more consequential; just because romantic comedies are supposed to be sweet doesn’t mean they have to dissolve like sugar, too. In all, The Wedding Date is fun, but not especially clever or memorable, and only marginally well acted.
The cast is led by Messing, who plays the main character, a New York single girl named Kat, whose younger sister, Amy (Amy Adams), is getting married in London to her boyfriend, Ed (Jack Davenport). But Ed’s best man, Jeffrey (Jeremy Sheffield), is Kat’s ex-fiancé. He broke off their engagement and ended their relationship of seven years, and so Kat, anxious about seeing him again under these circumstances, spends $6,000 to hire a male escort named Nick (Mulroney) to pretend to be her new boyfriend and show Jeffrey up. The plan works surprisingly well: Nick turns out to be exceedingly sophisticated and polite, and quickly reduces Jeffrey to a stammering puddle of jealous mush. But then, somewhat predictably, Nick and Kat begin to fall for each other, a romance that is obviously complicated by the dubious morals of their business arrangement.
Their romance is also complicated by the fact that while Mulroney and Messing acquit themselves separately, they don’t exactly set the screen on fire together. About halfway through the film, which was directed by Clare Kilner and written by Dana Fox, Nick professes to having a comparative literature degree from Brown University, which gives Fox an excuse to give Nick an almost endless supply of obtuse, vaguely wise dialogue -- one character calls him the Yoda of male escorts, though he later gets to poke fun at his own imperturbable demeanor by dropping a few unexpected expletives into the mix. Kat, meanwhile, is about as suspicious and unsure of this as you will be (a male escort with a degree from Brown?), although Messing makes the wise decision to paint Kat with the brush of nearly full-blown spastic comedy, and probably salvages some of her dignity in the process. The scene near the beginning of the film when Kat repeatedly changes dresses in the bathroom of a London pub shouldn’t be funny except that Messing consistently plays the character as an unreasonably anxious neurotic, and so the scene fits. More than a few laughs come at the unexpected lengths to which she is willing to take the character.
The Wedding Date has regrettably few surprises, though, and mostly proceeds by rote: Kat’s British-American family is predictably filled with the assorted oddballs and nut jobs that reliably turn up in the wings of commercial romantic comedies: Holland Taylor plays the typically affluent, American, possibly alcoholic mother, who delivers a pre-wedding toast that thoroughly embarrasses Kat; her British stepfather, Victor (Peter Egan), on the other hand, is probably one of the sanest members of the cast and much more likeable. (When Nick and Kat have sex in Victor’s boat, he asks Nick the next morning: “Are you a boatsman, son?” Nick evenly replies, “I am now, sir,” to which Victor says, without missing a beat, “I’m glad somebody’s putting her to use. The boat, that is.”) Sarah Parish is good for several laughs as Kat’s no-nonsense cousin, T.J. (when she first meets Nick, she is clearly smitten, and when Nick winks at her, she gushes to Kat, “I think I’ve just come,” one of the movie’s finer examples of unexpectedly edgier comedy). But the rest of the major supporting players are bland: Amy’s fiancé, Ed, is the familiar Brit goofball, and as the ostensible villain, Kat’s former fiancé, Jeffrey, would more aptly be described as slimy than despicable.
Despite the well worn paths the movie treads, however, The Wedding Date is mostly enjoyable because you end up caring about the characters. Kat has the hazy look and feel of a real person, albeit one who pursues extraordinarily outlandish and sometimes reckless means of achieving her ends (thankfully the film takes this with a grain of salt, and never opts for the big, third-act “reveal” in which Kat’s plan is uncovered). While the film’s target audience of women -- and especially the men that may be forced to accompany them -- may not be able to relate to Kat’s exact situation ($6,000 for a male escort just to make your ex-fiancé jealous?), they will certainly sympathize at the generalities of it, which probably makes it a more worthwhile movie than not.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)