In the doldrums of January, with Hollywood gracelessly dumping its shoddiest films, one would have understandable scepticism over Amazon’s glossy wedding confection You’re Cordially Invited. Recent attempts to replicate the big studio comedy for a streaming audience have almost all failed, from the intolerable Vacation Friends movies to Amazon’s heinous Space Cadet to joyless big-star Netflix vehicles like the recent Diaz/Foxx mess Back in Action. Even its stars have tried – Reese Witherspoon with charmless rom-com Your Place or Mine and Will Ferrell with grating Christmas musical Spirited – so expectations weren’t just low, they were deep underground.
It also didn’t help that Amazon refused to provide screeners to press, a clear sign that something was up. But even with the many low bars this would all put in place, there’s a surprising amount of low-rent fun to be had here, a simple and silly crowd-pleaser smartly reliant on the high wattage appeal of two, top-of-game professionals. Maybe my enjoyment was also boosted by something else, an ongoing frustration with the industry’s inability to crown a new generation of not just legitimate movie stars but legitimate comedy stars (they seem to exist more on the outskirts now, supporting actors who are in desperate need of it).
I’m not quite sure the film would really survive without the two but writer-director Nicholas Stoller, who tried and failed to resurrect the big screen Apatow comedy with the unfairly maligned Bros, knows exactly what he has and what he should do with it. Witherspoon is an actor who has teased us with brilliance in edgier films such as Election, Freeway, Pleasantville and Wild yet has recently chosen the high-money, low-reward gloss of The Morning Show, one of the most mind-bogglingly awful shows on television. This might not be a film that pushes her too far out of type (that type being type A) but Stoller gives her a spikier, saltier character than we’ve seen in a while, letting her curse, swig white wine and call people road whores (the film’s humour is often remarkably and refreshingly juvenile).
She plays reality TV producer Margot, living in LA and openly ashamed of her coarser family in the south, apart from sister Neve (the wonderful Meredith Hagner) who is getting married to her stripper boyfriend. As Margot insists herself as wedding planner, at the same time, Ferrell’s widowed father finds out his daughter (the also rather wonderful Geraldine Viswanathan) is also getting married, threatening their unusually close relationship. A mistake with scheduling means that both parties descend on a remote island at the same time, two weddings forced to share one space.
It’s an R-rated spin on Bride Wars, the Anne Hathaway-Kate Hudson comedy from 2009, a film even more reliant on star appeal to make it work. Stoller’s film is far superior (another low bar) as even without his leads, there are some very funny and specific little touches in the script. There are plenty of misses – a Jonas brother cameo, some overly absurdist physical comedy, a final song and dance – but they’re just about outdone by the hits – drunk Reese, a creepy father-daughter duet of a love song, every young person in the film using the word gaslighting without knowing what it means – and so the laugh quotient ends up higher than it has been for a while.
The real win here is watching Witherspoon and Ferrell show off, both unrestrained by a harder rating and a more raucous script than the norm and while their escalation of bad behaviour might not be quite as bad as it could have been, they both make for wonderfully petty antiheroes. Witherspoon in particular is a total joy, a confident comedic actor who knows exactly how big to go without going full pantomime, the sharpest performance we have seen from her in years. While the film doesn’t exactly reach anywhere near real, heart-tugging emotion, the sentiment is unusually restrained and, in its portrayal of two people who have over-invested in someone who was always going to invest more in someone else, it’s effectively etched.
Like so many weddings, it’s a little too busy with an abundance of characters and subplots to keep track of (although Celia Weston as Witherspoon’s awful southern mother is an obvious winner) and there’s a final left-of-field plot development that feels like it was suggested by a particularly stupid test audience. But there’s an unseasonably good time to be had here, invitation worth accepting.
You’re Cordially Invited is now available on Amazon Prime Video
