Toula Portokalos: Nia Vardalos
Ian Miller: John Corbett
Maria: Lainie Kazan
Gus: Michael Constantine
Nikki: Gia Carides
12 May 2003
by Jasmine Park
About the only people I can see recommending My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) to their friends are forty-something females with a fondness for elastic-waisted pants and for collecting cutesy ceramic statuettes. Either these people, or creeps who hate their friends. For all the praise it has widely earned, no non-studio movie could be more insulting to its audience than this seemingly innocuous trifle of a romantic comedy. The movie shoves its utterly conventional, "hey-look-how-ethnic-my-family-is" plot down our throats like some wretched aunt who tries to keep feeding you at the same time she tells you to lose weight.
The film is based on the stand-up material of Nia Vardalos, who stars in the film as Toula Portokalos, a frumpy, single thirty-year-old waitress working in the family restaurant, the Dancing Zorba. Her family includes an overbearing, sexist father, Gus (Michael Constantine), and a big loud mother (Lainie Kazan) who spews out useless ethnic advice at any opportunity. Toula lives in the shadow of her older married sister, who has already made her father proud by birthing three bratty sons, and is constantly pestered by her family to find a good Greek boy to marry at the same time that everyone assumes she's an eternal old maid.
Toula obviously looks so wretched to begin with so she will have room for improvement later in the film's obligatory makeover montage. She's spurred on when John Corbett (aka Chris, Aidan, and in this instance, Ian) strides into the restaurant one day and makes Toula swoon with his boyish English-teacher appeal. Somehow this encounter makes Toula work up the nerve to defy her father's baffling grudge against higher education by taking a computer class and experimenting with makeup and hairstyling. Suddenly she is striding around campus looking oh-so-Dress-Barn, and of course, catching Ian's eye, and the two begin a profoundly boring cutesy relationship. Thus begins the film's second half, in which Toula and Ian must withstand her family's attempts to take over the wedding plans.
Purely in terms of plot, the film suffers from a fatal lack of conflict or climax. There isn't a single villain, except perhaps Ian's parents, who are inexplicably goaded for being WASPs when they are about the only normal characters in the entire movie. Like the equally rancid Sweet Home Alabama, My Big Fat Greek Wedding thrives on punishing well-educated, upper-class characters for being uptight while flaunting backwards behavior as some symbol of honesty and integrity. What era are we living in when children are actually prohibited by their immigrant parents from receiving higher education? The film displays a total lack of modern-day sensibilities; even the most saccharine Hollywood drivel doesn't bother dwelling on a supposedly "controversial" wedding between two white characters. It is to the credit of the otherwise insipid Wedding Planner (2001) that it didn't blink an eye in mating a Puerto Rican girl with a wealthy white guy.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding also commits the cardinal sin of being shockingly un-funny. Vardalos raids the likes of The Birdcage, Strictly Ballroom, Moonstruck, and Father of the Bride to find the most worn-out wedding and ethnic jokes - and they weren't even funny the first time around. While it is faintly possible to admire the effort to make a film about modern-day Greek Americans, My Big Fat Greek Wedding just makes them seem like a stripped-down version of Bronx Jews from the 1930s.
What is perhaps even more offensive than the racial stereotypes continually reinforced throughout the film is that My Big Fat Greek Wedding so proudly wears the label of "independent film" when it only reeks of typical Hollywood mush. It curdles my blood to imagine how many other movies we will have to endure in the coming years that will try to recycle the inexplicable box-office success of this film (Monsoon Wedding and Bend It Like Beckham have already banked on its fans). Much like the equally overrated Spiderman (2002), the relatively obscene amount of money that My Big Fat Greek Wedding made in theaters is only a testament to the predictably bad taste of a whole lot of people, and how willing they are to consume what is the movie equivalent of particularly bad junk food. My Big Fat Greek Wedding encourages the proliferation of so-called "ethnic" films that purport to introduce the American moviegoing public to the intimate details of their culture, when in fact they only reiterate the suspiciously familiar details of every other so-called authentic cultural immigrant experience.
Lions Gate Films presents a film directed by Joel Zwick. Written by Nia Vardalos. Running time: 95 minutes. Rated PG (for sensuality and language).
John Corbett and Nia Vardalos
in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
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