After her revelatory performance in Jonathan
Demme's Rachel
Getting Married,
Anne Hathaway will have a much harder time getting away with pandering dreck
like Bride
Wars, which takes the burgeoning
Anne Hathaway wedding-movie subgenre from the sublime to the despicable. An air
of cynical commercial calculation hangs over the film, which witlessly explores
two preeminent American obsessions: planning and executing the perfect wedding,
and winning at all costs.
Producer Kate Hudson strays far outside her
comfort zone of adorably ditsy doe-eyed pixies as a heavy-banged legal barracuda
who has relentlessly dominated best friend/pushover Hathaway since they were
little girls dreaming about the perfect wedding. When wedding-planning
legend/narrator Candice Bergen accidentally schedules Hudson and Hathaway's
weddings on the same day in the same hotel, their friendship quickly sours, and
the desperate brides-to-be resort to increasingly brutal, implausible pranks to
sabotage each other's nuptials. The mean-spirited tricks run the gamut from
Hathaway replacing Hudson's normal hair dye with a blue substitute to Hathaway
furtively fattening Hudson up so she won't fit into her Vera Wang wedding
dress. But the stunts don't provoke laughter so much as raging contempt for the
film's deplorable characters.
After 75 minutes of horrible people doing terrible
things to each other for petty, spiteful reasons, the film takes a predictable
turn into nauseating sentiment to deliver the expected message about the
importance of friendship. It takes Hudson and Hathaway nearly the entire film
to figure out what audiences will understand immediately: Their stupid game of
one-upmanship is counterproductive and destructive. There may be a trenchant
satire to be mined from our culture's materialism-warped wedding madness, but Bride Wars instead opts for graceless, flailing,
poorly choreographed slapstick performed by characters who suggest a
dumbed-down tour production of Sex And The City.