Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) * * *

 

Directed by:  Mike Newell

Starring:  Hugh Grant, Andie McDowell, John Hannah, Simon Callow, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Charlotte Coleman, Rowan Atkinson, Anna Chancellor, James Fleet, David Haig

Four Weddings and a Funeral doesn't disappoint.  It crams four weddings and a funeral into its two-hour running time, giving each its own space to breathe and allow its characters to find love and happiness, both of which can sometimes be in short supply.   Does it drag occasionally?  Yes.  Truth be told, Hugh Grant and Andie McDowell make an attractive couple, but I wouldn't place them in the pantheon of great movie romantic partners.   But the movie introduced America to the sly comic brilliance of Hugh Grant, playing our reticent hero Charlie who loves Carrie (McDowell), whom he meets when he is the best man at the first wedding (and forgets the rings).  He is thunderstruck with love, but he is awkward in expressing his feelings.  Words don't flow from his mouth, but sort of tumble out.  Carrie finds him adorable anyway, but remains emotionally unavailable because she lives in America and by the second wedding, she is engaged to a rich man who "owns half of Scotland".  How could Charlie compete?

Charlie finds himself in one awkward situation after another.  While pining for Carrie at each event, at one he is seated at a table with former girlfriends who decry his inability to commit, at another he accidentally locks himself in a room where the groom and bride are having sex.   Maybe that's even the same wedding.  At another, Charles' gay friend Gareth (Callow), who lives at up at every event, passes away from a heart attack, leading to the touching funeral where his lover Matthew (Hannah), sums up his feelings in a poem.  Charles is accompanied by his gaggle of friends at each event.  The movie wisely chooses to develop the characters through the eyes of the events.  We don't see their personal lives unfold in any other way, so as not to complicate the plot or the movie.

Four Weddings and a Funeral is at its heart a light romantic comedy with obstacles thrown in front of Charles' and Carrie's happiness.  That's par for the course.   It contains laughs mostly because Charles is charming despite his verbal miscues and we like these people.  That's enough sometimes.