Although it enjoys a favorable reputation, The Wedding Party is not a very good picture. A knockabout comedy built around the nutty preparations for an upscale Long Island wedding, it mostly falls flat on its face due to a thin script and a fatal overdose of unfunny improvisations. The curiosity angle will be the main draw, as a very young Robert De Niro (billed as Robert Denero) and Jill Clayburgh feature in the cast. Disc producer Troma splashes their names shamelessly across the box illustration.
Synopsis: A large group of friends and family congregate at the Fish mansion for a wedding. Shy Josephine (Jill Clayburgh) is excited to introduce her fiancée Charlie (Charles Pfluger) to the dozens of attendees, while Charlie's pals Alistair (William Finley) and Cecil (Robert De Niro) kid and tease him to flee the ceremony while he still can. The preparations continue, culminating in a grand drunken dinner the night before the wedding.
This independent effort could almost be a class project for some very wealthy film students, as Brian De Palma shares all creative billing with two partners, Wilford Leach and Cynthia Munroe. Critics were unusually kind to the movie; Savant's best theory is that the troubled little picture got positive notices because the reviewers wanted to encourage fresh blood in American moviemaking.
The Wedding Party is a free-form screwball comedy that tries to make up in spirited improvisation what it lacks in anything resembling a real script. Scene after scene grinds on while the camera records various characters making up the details as they go along. A lot of screen time is spent waiting for comedy payoffs that don't materialize. A sloppy 'experimental' music score fails to set any kind of mood and eventually becomes headache inducing.
The acting is all over the place, as if the three cooks in the filmmaking kitchen just threw their favorite actor friends together and told them to be funny. Top billing goes to Valda Setterfield as the stuffy mother of the bride; she plays as if she were doing a guest spot on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. The various bridesmaids affect squeaky voices and otherwise try on "funny" characteristics without making an impact. Judy Thomas plays a mousy bookworm who tries to lure the groom-to-be to her bedroom before the ceremony, but the lack of direction and general pointlessness works against her.
Jill Clayburgh comes off the best as the sweet-hearted bride, but the loose ensemble style allows her no opportunity to put any depth into the character. We spend a lot more time with the indecisive groom, Charles Pfluger, but he's much less interesting.
Robert De Niro looks like a teenager still covered in baby fat and plays mostly in three-shot improvised long takes with Pfluger and William Finley. He manages a few good moments, but no clear-cut character emerges. Some sources say that The Wedding Party was released two years after it was finished, which would account for De Niro's adolescent appearance.
The actor who comes off best is William Finley, a talented De Palma pal who had been acting for him in short subjects since at least 1962. Finley remained as a fixture in De Palma's films through the seventies, finally getting his starring role in 1975 as The Phantom of the Paradise. Finley is ignored on Troma's box cover, which instead over-bills another De Palma favorite, Jennifer Salt (Hi Mom!). After a brief introduction, she's almost invisible in the movie.
If De Palma was responsible for most of the direction then he's to blame for the film's completely uninspired 'comedy' touches. The picture begins with a seemingly endless long shot of people running around a car in sped-up motion like Keystone Kops, and goes downhill from there. A lot of the footage is padding - walks in the woods, a long scene in a little boat. Only occasionally is there even a hint of creative thinking going on, as when the boys walk in a zig-zag pattern through a grove of trees while the camera switches back and forth between both sides. Francis Coppola admittedly had a bigger budget, but his earlier You're A Big Boy Now bursts with Richard Lester-like visual invention in almost every shot; The Wedding Party grinds on like a chore everyone couldn't wait to finish. A potentially charming sequence starts to form as the wedding party assembles to walk to the church. But it's too little, too late.
Troma's DVD of The Wedding Party is a fairly sloppy affair. The transfer is drab and the encoding not the best, so there isn't enough detail in the wide shots for us to read nuances into many facial expressions. The okay sound is on the murky side. Many more primitive audio jobs have been miraculously improved on DVD so we're not at all impressed.
Troma applies the same garish hype to promote this notable "film culture" title as it uses on its trashy horror-camp output. The box is covered with desperate text that pushes the credits, awards and favorable reviews of the featured players. De Niro is headlined as if he had an important role in the film. Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz feature their own names prominently on the crowded, messy cover and stick the Troma logo in our faces four times.
On the disc it's even worse. Pushing "play" starts us off with a DVCam home movie of an annoying "Troma Wedding Party." The so-called trailer is a cobbled-together video promo, and an irrelevant scene with a young Dustin Hoffman from Madigan's Millions is added as a cross-promotional bonus. Several other 'extras' look like film school homework projects from Herz or Kaufman's children, and have nothing whatsoever to do with The Wedding Party. Big ads appear for Troma merchandise. It's all very unpleasant, and makes us appreciate the way outfits like Something Weird actually respect their customers.
MGM's recently-issued disc of Brian De Palma's Hi Mom! shows the young director in much better form. Robert De Niro and Jennifer Salt's free-form improvisations make a much better impression.
To order The Wedding Party, go to TCM Shopping.
by Glenn Erickson
