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Film Review by Jack Nichols
What My Big Fat Greek Wedding does best, I'd say, is to magnify, through a Greek-American prism, this young nuptialist's multitudinous concerns. Through Toula Portokalos, her counterpart in the film, we're treated to the zany spectacle of her family's intimate involvement with her marital rituals. It becomes clear that this wedding, yes, this marriage, is earth's equivalent to the Big Bang of the universe itself. At first, we see Nia Vardalos as Toula in her mid-thirties-gasp-and she's still-in her own mind-- a kind of ultimate frump. Agnes Gooch working in Dad's restaurant. But then-out of the blue-- "he" appears: Ian Miller, played by John Corbett, a non-Greek. Following her uneventful meeting with this Inspirer, Toula effectively and admirably pursues the bettering of her own circumstances. Exit the frump look. Enter a wholesome Greek virgin who suddenly becomes aware that potato sack dresses won't work any special charms.
Toula's Dad, at first suspicious of her beau because he isn't a Greek, gets won over to him little by little, nevertheless, as the male outsider willingly submits himself as a participant in one excitable Greek family tradition after another. However cursorily we get to know this hubby-to-be, he allows us, nevertheless, an interesting look into the bland lives of his own rigidly proper and WASPy parents. No ethnic group, apparently, is safe in this flick. The Greeks are enjoying themselves dancing around being Greek, so why shouldn't these bourgeois suburbanites be the silly bores we'd expect them to be? Toula's Dad appears understandably proud of his Greek heritage, tracing every single English word to its Greek origins. The Greeks invented democracy, he likes to explain, and, natch, Greece cradled the practice of critical thinking, or philosophy. I kept thinking how he wasn't mentioning Plato's Symposium Somehow, however, while this very lighthearted film unfolded, I couldn't help but think - momentarily at least -- about this decade's newly hatched phenomenon of gay nuptials. It seemed natural to wonder if same-sex lovers too might some day be tempted to be occupied by such an amazing variety of marital necessities, ceremonies, ordinances and observances. Then, I thought, some have no doubt already succumbed to such a temptation! Not that I would object. People like markers, I've discovered, even when they're dead. And as I watched Ian Miller gladly embracing his Greek in-laws, I admired him for transposing himself so unflinchingly into the oddities of a different culture. One of the better messages this happy film delivers, is that a man who falls in love with someone from a different culture is a kind of Planet Earth hero if he agrees to reach out and to experience the truths of a lover's hard-core cultural eccentricities without making the obvious complaints. |
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My Big Fat Greek Wedding's Joey Fatone and Gia Carides
John Corbett and Nia Vardalos in My Big Fat Greek Wedding