'Bride Wars'
MOVIE REVIEW
Starring Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway, the revenge comedy about the wedding plans of longtime friends searches for its heart but never quite finds it.
It's no secret that there is big money to be made in the wedding business. Depending on the source, it's a thriving $50-billion- to $75-billion-a-year industry -- enough that if everyone agreed to take a year off, we could personally bail out the auto industry. All of which makes weddings and the cortege they spawn ripe for satire, farce and completely irreverent handling by Hollywood.
Now here comes "Bride Wars," all dressed in white and hoping to cash in on that obsession. In director Gary Winick's new film, the idea of romance and love is completely sidelined by the brides' burning desire to have the perfect wedding. (By perfect, I mean statistically better than anyone else's, particularly your best friend's.) Envy rather than happily-ever-after is the endgame, which would be fine if the farce, like a five-tiered lemon wedding cake, was tart, sweet and would melt in your mouth rather than simply trigger a gag reflex.
The idea of a revenge comedy isn't necessarily a bad one, "Bride Wars" simply fails at it despite having the formidable duo of Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway, who in their own distinctive ways usually command the screen.
Hudson's money shot is the smile; for Hathaway, just coming off an emotionally textured performance as a recovering addict in "Rachel Getting Married," it's the eyes. But Winick, who last brought us the lovely and gentle "Charlotte's Web" in 2006, has squandered his assets in what turns into a misanthropic take on love and marriage.
Director Danny DeVito did a far more credible job with the genre in 1989's "The War of the Roses," which took the battles of Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner's divorcing couple to lethal but comically biting extremes. Even 2005's "Wedding Crashers," with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as bottom feeders who troll these bloated productions, managed to have more of a heart. "Bride Wars" keeps searching for a heart but never quite finds it, and the movie loses its way as a result.
The story begins when Hathaway's Emma and Hudson's Liv glimpse a perfect princess version when they're just 6 during a visit to the Plaza Hotel. In a testament to the staying power of an image imprinted on the brain at an early age (a parental warning if there ever was one), the girls spend endless childhood hours planning and playing "wedding." Theirs too will be at the Plaza.
