‘Perfect paternalistic nonsense’: why Father of the Bride is my feelgood movie

4 days ago 4

I should hate this film. A possessive father loses the plot at the notion that his 22-year-old daughter – a sophisticated architecture student just back from a semester in Rome – is engaged to a man he hasn’t met. After she tells him the news at dinner, we see her saying it a second time through his eyes, as a seven-year-old. When the groom arrives, dad almost has an aneurysm at him daring to put his hand on her leg, and starts watching America’s Most Wanted every night looking for his face. He goes so cuckoo bananas over the prospect of their wedding that he loses it at the supermarket and briefly ends up in jail. “I was no longer the man in my little girl’s life,” he rues. It is paternalistic nonsense, and it is perfect.

I first watched the 1991 remake of Father of the Bride (FOTB) as a kid because it is my dad’s favourite film. As his only daughter I categorically refuse to read into this, though I enjoyed telling my boyfriend when I made him endure my recent rewatch. (Roughly my 975th viewing; his first and, I suspect, only.) It’s the film that made me fall in love with Steve Martin, our paranoid FOTB George Banks, and Diane Keaton, optimistic MOTB Nina, whom I came to regard as my cinematic parents, a comfort whenever I see them on screen.

Arguably, it’s neither of their best work, arriving at the end of their respective Hollywood imperial periods. (Anyone who argues that Keaton’s was the 70s evidently hasn’t seen 1987’s Baby Boom, another of my favourite regressive capers.) Keaton is a bit underused playing George’s sane foil – though as is her divine right, she still gets to preside over a magnificent kitchen, for this is a film co-written by Nancy Meyers and directed by her then husband Charles Shyer – and Martin is the ne plus ultra of wasp-chewing and eye-bulging, setting the tone for an exemplary farce.

One of my absolute favourite on-screen tropes is any character declaring: “It’s the 90s – get used to it!” I would read an entire book on the history of the line: who said it first? What do they mean?? Here, at least, it means good luck in the face of rampant capitalism. The rococo wedding planner Franck Eggelhoffer, played by a dialled-up Martin Short in an accent of, let’s say, indeterminate eastern European extraction, splutters “walkom to ze 90s, Moster Bonks!” when George winces at the cost of “de kaak” (the cake).

Certainly, George rocks some exemplary 90s normcore looks in this film, including the sneakers manufactured by his firm, and their young later-in-life son Matty (an adorable Kieran Culkin) has a Simpsons drawing on his bedroom door. But in bridal terms, FOTB is pure post-Diana 80s flounce: meringue dresses, a jazzy wedding singer played by Eugene Levy, swans dyed pink to match the tulips, obviously. Set to take place at the Bankses’ sprawling family home in a very Norman Rockwell California neighbourhood, it is, as Franck declares, fabolos.

A sympathetic read could see George’s freakout about the wedding as a justified response to the absurdity of the wedding industrial complex, but where would the fun be in that? Plus, as George’s sanity crumbles, the film makes very clear that he is the unreasonable one here for not wanting to spend $250 a head on guests. He spies on the in-laws and falls in their pool. In an attempt to save money, he buys a black “Armani” suit that may or may not have fallen off the back of a truck. Franck tries to help him sew a button back on his the morning of the wedding, but has the wrong colour thread, and informs him that Armani does not make a “navvy blue tuxado”, nor use polyester.

And what of Brian, the groom? He is a gender politics-literate New Man who supports his fiancee’s career and is almost always crying. He is not, FOTB makes clear, the love story that matters here.

Why do I come back to this film again and again? As a girl and younger woman I was emphatically against marriage (though I’ve since softened) and watched it more as a comedy horror than anything aspirational. The only aspect of the Bankses’ life I’d want is the kitchen. And yet watching Franck and the family put on their ridiculous show makes me want to be part of it. I love ritual, and ceremony, and Steve Martin, and Martin Short, and Diane Keaton.

I am so FOTB-pilled that when Vampire Weekend started teasing something called FOTB a few years ago, I tweeted a joke saying that I hoped it was a concept album about the film. The publicist emailed to ask how I knew the album really was called Father of the Bride and why I had leaked embargoed information. I hadn’t; the acronym is just etched that deep within my soul. Now, I bet you’ll never guess what happens in FOTB2 … 👶👶