Re-Views: ?My Big Fat Greek Wedding? (2002)

There were some Winter Olympics in 2002, but the year?s biggest underdog story was a different cultural sensation with Hellenic roots: ?My Big Fat Greek Wedding,? an independently financed romantic comedy that cost $5 million to make, grossed $368 million worldwide, and played in U.S. theaters for a whopping 52 weekends. On none of those weekends was it the No. 1 film ? in fact, it holds the record for highest-grossing movie never to reach the top of the box office ? and the most it ever made in one Friday-Sunday period was $11.1 million on its 20th weekend in release.

How much of a big fat deal was ?My Big Fat Greek Wedding?? The only 2002 films with higher grosses all had ?Spider-Man,? ?Lord of the Rings,? ?Star Wars? or ?Harry Potter? in their titles, while ?Greek? had no stars, was written by an unknown, and had a sitcom guy for a director. It got positive but not enthusiastic reviews (62 out of 100 at Metacritic) and had no marketing to speak of, yet continued to make money week after week thanks to an old-fashioned and unpredictable phenomenon known as ?word-of-mouth.?

The film was three weeks old when it opened where I lived, and wasn?t really on anyone?s radar yet. It had been doing brisk but unremarkable business so far, still in the ?sleeping? phase of being a sleeper hit. My buddy Josh and I saw it one evening in a packed theater, and I laughed myself silly. Thereafter a glowing review sprang forth from my gut, as condensed here:

What I said then: ??My Big Fat Greek Wedding? ? is one of the funniest, most joyous movies to come along since the Greeks invented comedy?. Some things turn out a lot messier in real life, but in the sunny world of ?My Big Fat Greek Wedding,? conflicts are handled with yelling, emotion and love. And then everybody eats and dances. The movie lives in a world that makes the rest of us envious?. The performances are dazzling?. The cast is huge ? Greek families are huge ? and there is character and humor on every face?. The movie passes the level of Very Funny Comedy and becomes a Great Film.? Grade: A [Read the whole thing, if you can stand it.]

As the film became more prominent over the next several months, the inevitable backlash emerged. Today we are accustomed to backlashes arriving after one weekend, and sometimes before a movie even comes out. But 2002 was a simpler time. These things took longer. (The eventual Oscar nomination for Nia Vardalos? screenplay only made the detractors angrier.) Some of the naysayers were vehement ? the movie is TERRIBLE, it?s an EMBARRASSMENT, it?s the WORST THING ? but most were more along the lines of, ?Whoa, whoa, this movie is all right, but it?s nothing special. You people who love it should just be liking it!?

That?s how I began to suspect I would feel. I re-watched the film near the end of 2002, and found that my affection had already diminished, in just a few months. I had second thoughts about some of my more flowery descriptors. (?The performances are dazzling?? ?One of the funniest, most joyous movies to come along since the Greeks invented comedy?? What was I thinking??) It didn?t even make my top 10 for the year, my raving, A-grade review notwithstanding.

The ensuing years have not been kind to the memory of ?My Big Fat Greek Wedding.? All of Nia Vardalos? subsequent projects (including the sitcom based on the film) have been disasters, causing people to wonder if they misjudged her first film. (See also: people who decided, after ?The Village,? that ?The Sixth Sense? must have been bad the whole time, too.) So it was with trepidation ? as it usually is with this column ? that I gave ?My Big Fat Greek Wedding? another look.

The re-viewing: It occurred to me within the first few minutes that a lot of Vardalos? humorous observations about growing up Greek-American have since been made by Tina Fey. Fey?s memoir, ?Bossypants? (which is astoundingly funny, by the way), speaks of being a swarthy girl with too much facial hair, of her body issues, of her parents? old-fashioned expectations of her. But Fey, in addition to being funnier anyway, never made her Greekness the focal point of her career, whereas Vardalos pigeonholed herself right out of the gate. Even if her later work had been popular, it would have been a long time before people stopped thinking of Vardalos as ?the ?Big Fat Greek Wedding? woman.?

That?s the problem with becoming famous for one thing, especially when that one thing is so specific. People start to dismiss you as a one-trick pony, a purveyor of shtick. There are plenty of laughs in ?My Big Fat Greek Wedding,? but almost all of them are connected to the central theme of ?look how funny Greek families are.? There?s little evidence here that Vardalos is capable of making jokes about anything else. That kind of specialization seldom holds up well in hindsight, which might be a key to why the film has lost its luster in people?s memories.

Some of the jokes are unbelievably corny. ?If nagging was an Olympics sport, my Aunt Voula would have a gold medal!? Vardalos tells us in voice-over, and you can practically hear the sitcom laugh track chuckling to itself. I had braced myself for a lot of that, but there wasn?t much. Most of Vardalos? screenplay is charmingly amusing, albeit slight. It resembles a generic but pleasant sitcom, yet isn?t as clunky as one. Vardalos? performance is more clever than I remembered, too, with a Molly Shannon-like emphasis on awkward stares and nervous habits.

John Corbett?s hairstyle in this film is grotesquely unflattering. They should have digitally replaced it for the DVD release. That is the entirety of my opinion on John Corbett.

Lainie Kazan and Michael Constantine really are terrific as Vardalos? uber-Greek parents. Gus and Maria Portokalos are written as broad cartoon characters, but the sympathetic actors are determined to make them as authentic as possible. Constantine?s efforts are especially good, balancing Dad?s old world sexism and superstition with real love and compassion for his daughter. He may be a stereotype, but he?s a sweet one.

In my original review, I cited a moment where the movie ?passes the level of Very Funny Comedy and becomes a Great Film? (ugh). That moment made me smile this time around but didn?t feel particularly significant. What struck me instead was another moment, a small thing that happens at the wedding reception. The groom?s hopelessly square and WASP-ish parents, Rodney (Bruce Gray) and Harriet (Fiona Reid), have mostly been in the background, reacting with sketch-comedy uncertainty to the loud wackiness of the family their son is marrying into. Now a little more relaxed, they get up to dance, and Rodney says, ?Let?s go, Harry!? ? a reference to an earlier gag where Harriet?s name was misspelled on the wedding invitations.

It?s the way he says ?Let?s go, Harry? that matters. His tone indicates that it?s already become an affectionate inside joke between him and his wife, and that there are no hard feelings toward the Portokalos family. Instantly we can imagine some of the bemused private conversations Rodney and Harriet must have had over the last several weeks as they?ve gotten used to their future in-laws. And now, in this subtle moment in an otherwise not-very-subtle film, we see that Rodney and ?Harry,? like us, have come to accept these crazy Greeks for the warmhearted, well-intentioned family that they are, never mind the maddening things they sometimes do.

Do I still love this movie? I would pour the celebratory ouzo a bit less freely, but yes, the film holds up as a simple, cheerful tribute to the insanity of family life and the comfort we find in traditions. If the stereotypical behavior of the Portokaloses resembles the cliches that have been applied to Italian and Jewish families in other movies, well, so what? All large, close-knit clans are like this to some degree, regardless of ethnicity. As Gus Portokalos says at the wedding reception, ?We are different ? but in the end, we all fruit.? Grade: B

Tags: My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Source: http://www.film.com/movies/review-my-big-fat-greek-wedding-2002

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