Review: Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral on Shout! Factory Blu-ray

This edition boasts a strong collection of extras, but that can’t make up for the 4K scan’s imperfections.

Four Weddings and a FuneralThe moving romance contained in Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral isn’t the central love story between likable layabout Charles (Hugh Grant) and carefree American Carrie (Andie MacDowell), who gradually fall in love over the course of the film’s four weddings and one funeral. Theirs is a pretty dull romance, a pairing of two attractive but innocuous socialites whose only impediment to getting hitched is bad timing. Grant brings his signature stuttering, fidgety charm to the role of Charles, but he has a hard time generating much chemistry with the affectless MacDowell, whose Carrie seems almost bored at the prospect of falling in love.

Charles and Carrie’s halting, labyrinthine path to the altar may form the film’s narrative spine, but its heart lies in the casual yet adoring relationship between quietly reserved Gareth (John Hannah) and ostentatiously chummy Matthew (Simon Callow), an older gay couple in Charles’s eclectic gang of friends. For the most part, Newell doesn’t call much attention to Gareth and Matthew’s love for one another; it’s simply a fact of Charles’s social circle, as stable and unchanging a reality as the miserable singleness of the rest of the group. But when Matthew suddenly drops dead—thus occasioning the funeral promised by the film’s title—Newell drops the otherwise unflagging tone of light-hearted farce for a nakedly emotional eulogy in which Gareth recites W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” in his melodic Scottish brogue.

Four Weddings and a Funeral tells us that this is what true love looks like, and to a contemporary viewer, that acknowledgment looks remarkably ahead of its time. Two decades before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, when such an idea was widely dismissed even by Democrats, here was a film presenting a gay couple as the very model of marital bliss. Without overt advocacy or even any apparent recognition that it was doing anything unusual—save perhaps for when an Anglican priest presiding over Matthew’s funeral pointedly introduces Gareth as the deceased’s “friend,” thus acknowledging social repression of homosexuality—Richard Curtis’s screenplay smuggles an incontrovertible argument for the equal rights of gay people into an otherwise completely mainstream romantic comedy: If Gareth and Matthew don’t deserve to get married, then who the hell does?

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Well, whether or not they deserve to, plenty of bland, interchangeable white people certainly do get hitched in the posh social milieu in which Four Weddings and a Funeral takes place. The film’s greatest strength, and the source of its enduring appeal, is its ability to capture the buzzy conviviality of a friend’s nuptials. Curtis’s script, which was nominated for an Academy Award, has an intuitive sense of the expansive yet finite social atmosphere of the British upper crust, a milieu in which everyone seems to know each other solely on the basis of their shared social status. In one of the film’s more memorable lines, a character demurs that his family isn’t the richest in England—that would be the queen’s—but only about the seventh.

Newell navigates the film’s sprawling wedding scenes with a deftly observant eye, providing the audience with a rich sense of these grand social events while maintaining the focus on the film’s core group of characters. Unfortunately, we never really learn much about these people; they’re like pleasant acquaintances we keep bumping into, folks we might like to know more about but never get the opportunity to ask. For one, the anti-nuclear posters hanging in the apartment Charles shares with his punkish companion, Scarlett (Charlotte Coleman), hint at deeper layers to these characters the film never comes close to exploring.

Nevertheless, Four Weddings and a Funeral suggests in its stronger moments a P.G. Wodehouse farce as directed by Robert Altman. As it surveys the goofy foibles and incestuous interconnections of the British elite with a quietly amused sense of detachment, the film is only occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, mostly courtesy of the ever-reliable Rowan Atkinson as a painfully awkward vicar. But the film manages to maintain an appealing air of light-hearted sophistication throughout. That’s thanks in large part to the ingenious structure of the screenplay, which fulfills the audience’s expectations while simultaneously playing with them. (Whose wedding will we see next? And whose funeral?) Curtis even manages to make it seem halfway plausible that Charles might go ahead and marry the wrong person.

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He doesn’t, of course. And everything ends up just as you expect, with Charles and Carrie sharing a tearful denouement and rapturous kiss in the middle of a torrential downpour. “Is it raining?” Charlotte coyly asks in the film’s corniest line, “I hadn’t noticed.” Four Weddings and a Funeral might demonstrate a bit of subversiveness in its depiction of gay love, but when it comes to giving us the happy ending we crave, the film is as conventional as can be.

Image/Sound

Four Weddings and a Funeral is no one’s idea of a gorgeous film, but Shout! Factory’s new 4K scan of the original camera negative at least manages to do justice to the film’s images, correcting the telecine wobble of MGM’s previous Blu-ray and the poor color timing of older DVD releases. This release also helpfully provides both 5.1 and 2.0 DTS-HD audio tracks. The new scan preserves the original 35mm film grain, lending a pleasing texture and depth to movie’s soft, bright surfaces. However, Shout! makes no attempt to cover up some of the errors in the original negative, and there’s a notable amount of digital noise in the transfer. The scan ends up magnifying some significant A/V issues, including large flecks of dust and poor sound quality in some of the film’s outdoor sequences. Ultimately, this 4K scan, while visually and aurally superior to previous releases, feels like a fairly slapdash effort on Shout!’s part.

Extras

Given the film’s rather plain images, it might seem odd that the only new feature on this Blu-ray is a lengthy interview with director of photography Michael Coulter. But while it’s over-long and seemingly practically unedited, this chat turns out to be remarkably enlightening, deepening one’s appreciation for the complicated, almost documentary-style camerawork that lends such a verisimilitude to the film’s many party sequences. The rest of the extras are held over from previous releases and provide a robust, if somewhat redundant, selection of documentary featurettes. The audio commentary by Mike Newell, Richard Curtis, and producer Duncan Kenworthy, recorded for the 10th anniversary DVD release of the film, provides a chummy collection of reminiscences and behind-the-scenes anecdotes.

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Overall

This new home-video edition of the film boasts a strong collection of extras, but that can’t make up for the 4K scan’s imperfections.

Score: 
 Cast: Hugh Grant, Andie MacDowell, James Fleet, Simon Callow, John Hannah, Kristin Scott Thomas, David Bower, Charlotte Coleman, Timothy Walker, Sara Crowe, Rowan Atkinson, David Haig, Sophie Thompson, Corin Redgrave, Anna Chancellor, Rupert Vansittart  Director: Mike Newell  Screenwriter: Richard Curtis  Distributor: Shout! Factory  Running Time: 118 min  Rating: R  Year: 1994  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Keith Watson

Keith Watson is the proprietor of the Arkadin Cinema and Bar in St. Louis, Missouri.

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