Review: Destination Wedding

The way Destination Wedding uses misanthropy to augment screwball tropes ends up being its undoing.

Destination Wedding
Photo: Regatta

Writer-director Victor Levin’s Destination Wedding casts Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder as a rather nasty pair of middle-aged narcissists whose courtship consists primarily of hating on both each other and everyone else around them. Frank and Lindsay are a crude, cynical spin on a Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn twosome, but the way Destination Wedding uses misanthropy to augment screwball tropes ends up being its undoing, as Levin’s film seems to forget that all-important ingredient of the farcical romance, which ’90s nostalgia cannot supply on its own: charm.

Frank and Lindsay are guests at a wedding neither wants to attend. They meet in line at the airport, and their interaction rapidly—too rapidly—devolves into a trading of insults. Frank is disdainful of other people’s idiosyncratic concerns, while Lindsay is full of idiosyncratic concerns; after all, she’s the kind of person who carefully reads Yelp reviews of airlines before flying. What they have in common, Destination Wedding wants us to understand, is an impatience for other people in general. Upon arriving at the wedding, they avoid contact with all the other guests, sitting together apart from the festivities even while professing to dislike each other’s company. Gradually, they must admit, with considerably less frankness than they admit to their mutual distaste for one another, their growing mutual affection.

Levin, a veteran writer and producer of such ’90s sitcoms as Dream On and Mad About You, captures Frank and Lindsay’s self-imposed alienation from the rest of society by shooting the film’s other characters from a distance. The only context in which we even see the other guests at the eponymous wedding is in long shots from Frank and Lindsay’s perspective, as the pair sits on the perimeter of the rehearsal dinner, in the back row of the wedding, or hidden between wine barrels at a wine tasting. With its detached gaze and ironically bouncy gypsy-jazz soundtrack, Destination Wedding might be praised for its tonal consistency—it’s nothing if not droll—but this consistency comes to feel a lot like repetitiveness as the film progresses.

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The film’s script is too clever by half, alternating between pithy, Wildean paradoxes and verbose theses on mundane topics. Eventually, though, the mile-a-minute, epigrammatic dialogue buries both our sense of the characters and our interest in their budding relationship. It doesn’t help that there isn’t much to Frank and Lindsay beyond their abject behavior. Frank comes off as a semi-closeted “men’s rights” activist: He’s appalled to hear that Lindsay’s specialty as a lawyer is discriminatory language at the workplace, accusing her of being the “P.C. police,” and he’s bemused at the existence of the pansexual wedding officiant who “would fuck a woman who believes she’s a gay man.” Meanwhile, Levin exposes Lindsay as a liberal hypocrite who’s as prone to racist assumptions as Frank and who delights in Frank’s objectification of her even while claiming to find it disgusting. Putting Reeves and Ryder in a playfully nihilistic but ultimately safe romantic comedy already evidences that generation X has grown pretty long in the tooth, but it’s Destination Wedding’s politics that truly reflect middle-aged America in 2018.

Score: 
 Cast: Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder  Director: Victor Levin  Screenwriter: Victor Levin  Distributor: Regatta  Running Time: 86 min  Rating: R  Year: 2018  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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