Destination Wedding

Fun fact that’s likely missed amidst all the negativity on this site: I’m a miserable prick.  I mock people all around me, even if only in my head.  Everything is a source of derision, including myself, a favorite target.  My enjoyment of weddings is limited to feelings of happiness for the couple involved and maybe the presence of an open bar (a pox on the house that goes either the cash bar route or *shudder* the dry route), the rest of the time taken up by solitary misery.  Long story short, I’m the perfect audience for a film like Destination Wedding.

In this film, we follow Lindsay and Frank, two single and miserable sods who have been invited to a destination wedding in Paso Robles.  From the get-go, they find themselves constantly bumping into each other, each time seemingly exacerbating the already-present animosity they have for each other, themselves, and the rest of the world.  As time goes on, though, they’re basically forced to spend time with each other (as a single guy at weddings in the past, I can vouch for this sort of situation being possible), resulting in them communicating on a deeper level and growing close.  Is it love?  Tough to say when you’ve basically scorned the entire idea, but ya never know.

Sounds like your usual offbeat rom-com, don’t it?  Well, not quite.  As far as this film’s universe is concerned, self-loathing narcissists Frank and Lindsay are the only real characters alive, everyone else relegated to a background role requiring squinting to properly see.  We never interact with anyone beside these two, save a couple very quick instances.  That’s right, it’s an hour-and-a-half of two people bickering.  If only ’twere a Vicious marathon…

The result is something like a cross between Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Clerks.  Indeed, writer/director Victor Levin often finds a way to overwrite his characters’ lines, adding in some $20 diction that no one would actually say, making Keanu Reeves all the more awkward here.  You remember the crazy philosophical stuff that didn’t quite mesh with the clerks’ Jersey characters, yet it still somehow made some lick of sense?  Yeah, that doesn’t happen so much here, the lines are just weird.  This is made all the more apparent by the lack of any other characters and the lack of response from the other character in the shot.

Things are helped, though, by the obvious chemistry between Reeves and Winona Ryder.  I remember them most as the barely-together Harker couple in Dracula, but they’ve also co-starred in A Scanner Darkly and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, so they’ve been around each other plenty, and it shows.  The stage-y dialogue doesn’t hamper them when they’re able to just roll with each other’s feelings and keep the narrative a-pumpin’.

And it’s a good thing they have such strong chemistry, ’cause we’re gonna see pretty much nothing but the two of them conversing for the duration.  Yup.  Though much of what they say doesn’t quite land, plenty does, and the occasionally-laconic drollness and sharpness of wit provides a good amount of laughs.  Unfortunately, things run very dry very early on, and things don’t change much as time marches on.  I found myself gradually coming around after about twenty minutes of questioning the filmmakers’ choices (as well as my own life choices), but I can’t fault anyone for not following suit.  It’s hard to explain, but the style presented here is incredibly caustic and trying, but not altogether unfulfilling.  Levin, after all, penned a good thirty or so episodes of Mad About You, so he knows a thing or two about constant back-and-forths in the romantic foibles world, and it shows here.  But you have to wade through the mannerisms of a pair of highly unlikable (if a bit self-reflecting) characters and a lack of, y’know, anything actually happening in order to get to the chewy, baggage-laden core.

It’s a decent-enough ride if you can get comfortable, but this isn’t an easily-approachable film by any stretch.  It’s mostly worth it in the end, if that helps, but, like exercising, it takes some work and diligence to reap the full rewards.  Like I said, I fault no one for skipping out early.