My school is on its Spring Break right now, so that gives me more time to look over movies I haven’t seen that I can then review here. Good thing too since there are a number of movies on my various watchlists that are leaving at the end of the month. But what would I look at next? I tend not to watch and review movies of the same genre too many times in a row, but there were a few folks I knew who were surprised I somehow hadn’t seen Four Weddings and a Funeral. I finally opted on this one because I thought it might make a nice change of pace to see Hugh Grant in the early rom-com part of his career after seeing his fast-talking arms dealer character in Operation Fortune.
Besides, this one was about as different from The Break-Up as it was possible to be while still being a rom-com.
Charles (Grant) is the best man at his friend Angus’s (Timothy Walker) wedding where he and his friends all seem to be proud to be unmarried. But then he meets the beguiling American guest Carrie (Andy MacDowell). The two hit it off, but Carrie needs to return to America the next day. Over the course of the movie, Charles will attend as the title suggests three more weddings and one funeral. He will run into Carrie at each of these events, and sometimes the wedding might be for one of them.
That is basically the plot for this movie. Charles and Carrie keep running into each other. He’s smitten with her. She might be smitten with him. But the fact that she’s American and comes and goes rather regularly means he doesn’t really get to spend as much time with her as he’d like. Meanwhile, his various friends are having their own romantic travails and so forth.
OK, I’ll make this one brief: this is a funny and charming movie. Yes, rom-coms aren’t my thing, and this is far from my all-time favorite, but it doesn’t have the sort of predictable plot with a third act break-up and the like that I would normally see in an American-made rom-com. Instead, it’s more about missed connections and Charles’s general clumsiness, whether it’s accidentally finding himself in a hotel with a bride and groom who couldn’t wait for the reception to end or just continued run-ins with one ex-girlfriend (Anna Chancellor) who just hasn’t seemed to get over him.
As it is, this is a clever little movie with likable characters, and given the genre, most of them get a happy ending (there’s still that funeral) whether its the pining-for-Charles Fiona (Kristin Scott Thomas), the guy who makes Charles look smooth Tom (James Fleet), or Charles’s deaf brother David (David Bower). It’s not my usual genre, but this one was fairly charming and made for a good viewing.
Grade: A-
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