Thursday Minute
No. 55 | March 18, 2010

Humour Me

Our theme this week (theme introduction)
British comedies from the 1960s to today

Featured this week
Monday         —   Dr. Strangelove or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Tuesday         —   Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Wednesday    —   A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Three questions, three answers
This one’s a romantic comedy, with lots of weddings, as they tell you right in the title, and a happy ending.  It’s hardly as subversive as some of the other films this week, wouldn’t you say?

I’m not so sure about that.  You’d hardly call the film a ringing endorsement of marriage.  The first wedding is a bit of a drunken, desperate affair, highlighted by Charlie’s highly irreverent toast, wittily delivered by Hugh Grant.  The second is one long joke, and a funny one until Charlie meets Carrie’s fiancé.  The third, Carrie’s, doesn’t last.  The fourth, Charlie’s, is done in desperation.  If there’s one ceremony that the filmmakers treat with any seriousness it’s Gareth’s funeral.  There’s more affection expressed at the graveside (by Gareth’s gay lover, no less) than at all the altars put together.  Many romantic comedies end with the wedding of the two stars, implicitly making the point that’s why people fall in love.  Four Weddings and a Funeral plays against that idea, which is one reason why it works.

Again there is the American interloper in the midst of a bevy of Brits.  What about that?

That seems to be a recurrent theme.  Maybe the Brits don’t know what to do without us.  Maybe we’re good comic foils.  Maybe they do it for business reasons.  Andie MacDowell gets the call this time, playing Carrie, the American beauty who catches Charlie’s eye and captures his heart.  She never really seems anything more than an outsider, though, while the Brits alone are in on all the fun.  Maybe it’s MacDowell’s performance, maybe it’s the writing, but I suppose it’s to the film’s credit that it still succeeds as a comedy and as a romance when it seems to have gotten one fundamental point wrong.  The movie is about Charlie’s search for love, and if you ask me, he blows it.  He ends up with the aloof Carrie and passes on his longtime admirer Fiona.  With all due respect to Andie MacDowell—he could have had Kristin Scott Thomas!  Hugh!  In the words of a famous talk-show host, “What the hell were you thinking?”

Was he just clueless?

At first, yes, but he has no excuse after the scene at Carrie’s wedding (clip below).  Fiona tells Charlie she’s been in love with the same bloke for ages, and he asks who it is.  “You, Charlie.  It’s always been you.”  I think of it as her “I coulda been a contenda” speech.  You remember On the Waterfront:  ”It wasn’t him, Charley.  It was you.”  (Or for a rather different take, Raging Bull.)  Charlie, lucky for him, doesn’t end up on a meat hook but with a kiss in the rain.  Fiona’s future is a spot beside Prince Charles—it’s not a happy ending for everybody.

Three more from the 1990s

• Brassed Off (1996)
• The Full Monty (1997)
• Waking Ned Devine (1998)

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Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
Mike Newell, director
Wedding Two:  Rowan Atkinson (Father Gerald), David Haig (Bernard), Sophie Thompson (Lydia)

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Four Weddings and a Funeral
Hugh Grant (Charlie), Kristin Scott Thomas (Fiona)

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Four Weddings and a Funeral
Hugh Grant (Charlie), Andie MacDowell (Carrie)

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W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues”

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One of the Greats
Peter Cook was an influential figure in British comedy.  He gained prominence as a member of the satiric show Beyond the Fringe, with Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore, and he worked for decades on the British stage, on television, and in movies.  His film work includes The Wrong Box (1966), Bedazzled (1967), The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970), and The Princess Bride (1987).  In a poll conducted by Channel 4 in the U.K. in 2005, ten years after his death, Cook ranked at the top among comedians’ comedians—the funniest person of the English-speaking world.

…58…59…60.

1. KarmaSartre says:

   March 18, 2010 at 1:19 pm

   Rowan did an earlier, superb stint in the role of the Pastor presiding at a wedding. Part of his stand-up routine. The Father of the Bride speech is wonderful. (R-rated)
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4t03uBWYCw

   Here’s the unimprovable John Hannah reading the Auden:
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_a-eXIoyYA
2. remedios caseros hemorroides says:

   January 14, 2012 at 2:21 am

   Public Enemies erases that borderline between close proximity and objective control. By placing the audience in the immediacy of Dillinger’s present, the close-ups lose their emotional edge, their ability to read character subjectivity, and we are ultimately left with mannerist excess.