I Don't Hate "The People We Hate at the Wedding"

Heyo!

Let's talk about another movie!

I had an unusual experience watching "The People We Hate at the Wedding" (2022).

At first, I was excited to watch a comedy featuring several actors I really love, including Kristen Bell and Allison Janney.

Then I watched the trailer and thought it looked basically unwatchable.  I was very disappointed.

Next, on a day when I had a strongly devil-may-care-if-I-watch-an-awful-movie moment, I started watching it.  It was hilarious.  I audibly laughed multiple times within the first 15 minutes.

I then felt guilty I was watching it without Husband, so I stopped.  (After watching a few more minutes.)

We then watched the movie together at a later date.  Even upon partially rewatching it, it was so good!  And Husband liked it too!

Then we got to the end.  As the credits rolled, Husband astutely observed, "I felt like that was a 5 until it kind of fell apart at the end?"  Which, devastatingly, is accurate.

So to back up:

• The first 85% of this movie is incredibly fun.  It's well-written and very funny. 
• The characters are well-developed and each have decently-realized backstories and character arcs.
• The performances are spot on.  Kristen Bell and Allison Janney (more favorites of the blog) absolutely deliver, as do their main castmates Ben Platt and Cynthia Addai-Robinson.
• There are also great supporting performances from Jorma Taccone, Karan Soni, Isaach De Bankolé, and Lizzy Caplan.
• This doesn't typically matter so much to me, but the soundtrack is great!
• They make fun of therapists in a way I found thoroughly entertaining and also so specific that I'm pretty much sure someone involved in writing the movie had a bad experience working in someone's lab in Pennsylvania.  While the film's portrayal of a specific type of evidence-based therapy is exaggerated for laughs to the point that it is overly disparaging and at least partially inaccurate, this is one of those rare instances where I'll let this kind of thing slide because it was genuinely hilarious.

With all this going for it, I would have almost certainly bet this movie was destined for a 5 rating.  So what happened?

My best guess is that the writers felt so much pressure to wrap up "The People We Hate at the Wedding" in a neat and tidy little bow that they forgot to who their characters really were, and were therefore unable to continue to make the movie snappy and funny.  Which is such a shame, because it is exactly the characters' messiness--the behavior and attitudes that earn them the hateration referenced in the film's title and that should have made a neat and tidy ending impossible--that positioned this movie for greatness.  

These are not people who have photogenic endings as the movie would have its audience think.  They have complicated and at times painful relationships with each other and they act that out in all sorts of counter-productive but amusing ways.  

In fact, "The People We Hate at the Wedding" is in so many ways a refreshing correction to "A Bad Moms Christmas" (2017; ironically another Kristen Bell movie) and others like it: these relationships are difficult, but the characters openly acknowledge and contend with that, sometimes through passive aggression, sometimes through overt aggression, and sometimes actually pretty effectively, assertively, and even lovingly and kindly.  It's not that they don't deserve or couldn't accomplish a happy ending together, but instead that it shouldn't have been a cutesy picture-postcard, happily-ever-after-with-no-bullshit-in-the-future ending.  It's in abandoning the healthier and more accurate narrative it started out with that "The People We Hate at the Wedding" loses its way.

 So because it's still so good but not perfect, I begrudgingly gave it a 4.

{Heart}