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Friday, February 4, 2005
'The Wedding Date' is a familiar frolic
The generic romantic comedy of the season is not quite the event its creators hoped for. The theme is bridal, the cast is cute, the characters vaguely colorful, and the details sure to be forgotten after the nuptials are concluded.
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Debra Messing stars as a highly competent New York customer-service professional who melts into an anxiety-riddled wreck when she sets out for her perky little sister's London wedding. Partly that's because the love of her life, who unceremoniously dumped her after their engagement, is the best man. And partly because she's hired herself a boyfriend for the event.
As it turns out, her hired squire (Dermot Mulroney) is not merely a suave, smart and sexy professional escort, he's the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold and a soul of a romantic. And all she wanted was someone to show up her sister, make her ex-boyfriend miserable and give her mother something more to talk about than her past romantic disasters.
Sitcom star Messing has the charisma to carry her first theatrical lead -- she lights up the screen with every toothy smile -- but her performance is still small screen, all nervous tics and anxious looks. Mulroney has the confidence and cool of a lightweight 21st-century Cary Grant, with a savvy understanding of human nature in place of Grant's gravitas.
They make for an engaging designer couple in second-hand roles, modestly elegant partners stepping lightly through a romantic comedy rerun full of supermarket paperback psychology.
Director Clare Kilner attempts to create something more from the characters than the script offers, with memorable help from Sarah Parish as Messing's brassy best friend and a warmly understated Victor Ellis as her steady, supportive stepfather. But the family idiosyncrasies are half-hearted and the lingering grudges described in conversations are barely glimpsed in the film.
Kilner's light touch keeps the romantic pair dancing around their romance without tripping, but as the film reaches the inevitable happy ending, the steps look all too familiar.
NO REVIEW
"Boogeyman," a horror film starring Barry Watson, Emily Deschanel, Skye McCole Bartusiak and Lucy Lawless, opens today without any advance screenings for critics, so we don't have a review. We'll run one in the Life and Arts section in the next few days.
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