Product Description

Robert Altman looks at the institution of marriage and finds hilarity. All-star cast includes Carol Burnett, Lauren Hutton, Dina Merrill, Mia Farrow and Pat mccormick.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17388 in DVD
• Brand: TCFHE
• Released on: 2007-06-12
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
• Original language: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 125 minutes

Amazon.com
After the intensity of 3 Women, Robert Altman joked that he would relieve the pressure by "shooting a wedding." Fittingly, A Wedding, like many of his ensemble efforts, is part serious and part comic--much like the man himself. It begins with the ceremony, where brace-faced Muffin (Amy Stryker) and two-timing Dino (Desi Arnaz Jr.) are joined in holy matrimony by a rickety old bishop (John Cromwell, anticipating Rowan Atkinson's bumbler in Four Weddings and a Funeral). At the rambling reception, other parties come into play, including the parents (Carol Burnett and Paul Dooley vs. Anita Van Pallandt and Vittorio Gassman), the silent sister (Mia Farrow), the stressed-out wedding coordinator (Geraldine Chaplin), and the pesky photographer (Lauren Hutton). Then there's Dino's frail grandmother (Lillian Gish), who'll be lucky to make it through the day alive. As in Gosford Park, Altman spends as much time with the well-heeled guests as the behind-the-scenes staff. If anything can go wrong as these divergent personalities come together, it does. Regarding the 48 cast members, his son Stephen quips in the accompanying featurette, "I think he just wanted to double the 24 actors that were in Nashville." If they don't all register, A Wedding still ranks as one of the more democratic films ever made (the director's three co-writers all have bit parts). The film, which grows darker and more chaotic as it hurtles ahead, may be "minor Altman," but as wedding-related satires go, this widescreen effort stands tall. Suffice to say, hide-bound traditionalists need not apply. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Customer Reviews

Don't write it off!
Let's put it this way: When I first saw "A Wedding" as a 16-year-old, I was bored to near-suicide -- but then, I was just as bored by real-life weddings, and had precious little time to waste on such mundane events, let alone the nuances of interpersonal family relationships. I had more important things to do (like, stand in line for 36 hours for Eagles tickets).

Upon my second screening some 20-odd years later, I realized just how much pure, rich gold I had missed the first time around, owing to my teenaged self-absorption.

"A Wedding" is not a film for the young, nor for anyone uninterested in the dynamics of the family. But for those who have earned some hard-won wisdom about family, dashed dreams, and the self-imposed need to act "properly," this film holds great rewards.

It's a quiet picture, yes -- but for the alert, the introspective, and the "rode-hard" -- it delivers, in spades. As one previous reviewer wrote, it is indeed black comedy... but then, so isn't every forced-family event?

Black Humor at Its Best
Altman's technique of interweaving plots is perfectly suited to weddings, one-time events where participants, all with their own axes to grind, clash. Filmed in pre-politically correct 1978, this film simply gets better with age. The all-star cast is a joy, especially Lillian Gish and Mia Farrow, who plays a pubescent nymphomaniac.

Unlike Short Cuts or Ready to Wear, but like Nashville and Gosford Manor, this is an Altman film where it all comes together and works. Good stuff.

So close, yet so far
Altman's follow-up to NASHVIILE (after having done THREE WOMEN in between) promised to do for the American family and the class system what NASHVILLE itself did for pop culture and democracy. The film doesn't live up to the standard of the earlier film by a long shot, and is much too wild and woolly to suit its topic. Yet it does have some great moments of redemption.

The film explores an afternoon at the home of one of the great wealthy old families in Chicago--the Sloans--as Dino Corelli (Desi Arnaz, Jr.), the grandson of the family's elderly matriarch Netty (Lillian Gish), marries "Muffin" Brenner (Amy Stryker), the brace-faced daughter of a newly wealthy Kentucky trucking company owner. The scenes near the beginning of the wedding guests frantically trying to find bathrooms in the Sloan mansion after the ceremony are as good as anything Altman's ever done. But the film loses a great deal of focus after that: it seems to be missing a center (not enough is done with either the groom or the bride--despite Stryker's promising performance--to make you care enough about either of them). And some of the bits, such as those involving the crazy security team hired to protect the wedding gifts, belong in another film altogether. The film's great redemption is Carol Burnett's performance as Muffin's mother Tulip, a deeply conventional (yet very likable) middle American woman whose life is turned upside down when the groom's wealthy uncle tells her he's fallen in love with her at first sight. At first shocked and (literally) nauseated, Tulip becomes slowly intrigued as she begins to see a possibility for her life she never imagined before. The emotional arc her character takes in the film is amazing: although Burnett's performance has some similarities to her work on her comedy show, it is much more subtle and fleshed out. Her Tulip Brenner, like the best characters in NASHVILLE, is someone you wonder about long after the movie is over: she seems like a real and fully developed person.