There’s not much to love about The People We Hate At The Wedding
Even with Kristen Bell, Ben Platt, and Allison Janney, this chaotic wedding comedy never makes it down the aisle
Film Reviews Addai
To be alive is to attend weddings. And to be a moviegoer is to watch wedding movies. Try as you might, you can’t escape the nuptials in real life or on the big screen, and they are great fodder for cinema because conflict is baked in. That’s the drama and comedy that The People We Hate At The Wedding promises to deliver, but as with the chicken/steak/vegetarian entree you selected, this film will leave you unsatisfied and wishing you’d spent your evening at Red Lobster.
The premise of The People We Hate At The Wedding, based on the novel by Grant Ginder, is simple enough: siblings Alice (Kristen Bell) and Paul (Ben Platt) desperately want to skip their half-sister Eloise’s (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) wedding because they hate other guests in attendance. Alice endures a miserable corporate existence while engaged in an affair with her boss (Jorma Taccone). Meanwhile, Paul, whose job involves dumping trash on people as some sort of OCD therapy, is not looking forward to seeing his mother Donna (Allison Janney). Donna, however, who had Eloise with a womanizing aristocratic Frenchman named Henrique (Isaach De Bankole), is giddy to have all three children under one roof/industrial wedding tent. Since Eloise is British, the remaining members of the family must commute to London for the festivities.
As expected, things go awry almost instantly. Alice decides to try and smuggle her married boss into the wedding, but he keeps getting delayed. In the meantime, she drinks heavily, makes passive-aggressive (and aggressive-aggressive) comments about Eloise’s inherited wealth, and singlehandedly ruins a hot tub boating trip down the Thames (something that seems both incredible fun and epically disgusting at the same time). Paul brings along his longtime boyfriend Dominic (Karan Soni, easily the best part of this film), but Dominic thinks the emotionally fraught trip is the perfect time to cajole Paul into having their first threesome. Donna, when not trying to prove she’s an LGBTQ+ ally, is shacking up with her ex-husband. And Eloise, who for some reason doesn’t really understand any of the dynamics at play, is quickly unraveling while her family members repeatedly make the worst possible life decisions. The film tumbles onward towards its inevitable disastrous climax and kumbaya ending, making pit stops at the bachelorette party, rehearsal dinner, wedding ceremony, and reception along the way.
Unfortunately the film serves up plenty of “people we hate at the wedding,” and few to invest in. The chemistry and comedy that director Claire Scanlon was able to conjure up in Set It Up is nowhere to be found here. To start, both Alice and Paul are grating and insufferable. They whine about everything, and their reasons for being miserable are revealed to be flimsy misunderstandings. Bell and Platt further make them so unlikeable that when Alice gets a new love interest (Dustin Milligan from Schitt’s Creek), you’re actively rooting for him to run for his life. (The feeling isn’t helped by the instant comparison between Alice and Alexis Rose). Platt’s Paul is similarly a wet blanket, and trying to prop them up against an overly chipper Allison Janney just makes the film feel ill-cast. Janney after all is best when she can be wry and witty. Addai-Robinson is mostly relegated to hand wringing in the corner. That a film with so many batshit moments (a menage a trois, a mid-wedding arrest, people pissing on one another) can be so uninteresting speaks to how unsympathetic the characters are.
As with a bad wedding toast, The People We Hate At The Wedding is nearly devoid of laughs, fails to convey sincere emotion to those watching, and goes on too long. If you’re in need of a wedding rom-com, there are dozens of better options (Plus One, Father Of The Bride, Bridesmaids, hell even Ticket To Paradise) to say yes to. This slog of a film will have you checking your watch, wishing for an open bar, and begging for the sparkler sendoff.
22 Comments
Even with Kristen Bell, Ben PlattSix words in and you already lost me.
Kristen Bell seems like a delightful person, but she’s in the same category as Ryan Reynolds of likeable people who make movies that don’t look very good and aren’t too terribly interesting.
It’s weird, her TV record is way better than her film record.
Hardly anyone has a better TV track record than Kristen Bell. This sounds about as interesting as all of her other movies, not very
Definitely. It’s funny she’s going back to this well, I thought she grew out of her crappy romcom phase 10(?!) years ago.
I’ll stick up for Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which I think is one of the better comedies of the last 10+ years (especially the unrated version).
It should only be from word 5-6 that lost you.
I can see from the timestamped comments that my memory is correct and this review appeared 2 days ago. So why is it on the frontpage now?
Comment Time Machine!
Yeah I had the same question…
Are all gay dudes really really all about threesomes or is that a trope?
All dudes are. It’s a dude thing.
why stop at three
As a gay man, I’d wager straight dudes are more into threesomes than gay ones. I’ve been in more than a few and there are ways to make them fun, even more fun if there are more than three guys. But it’s more physical than psychological. For straight guys, I have to imagine there’s the added psychological allure of gender. Men and women don’t sexually think alike, which is one of the many things that makes me sure I’m sure I’m gay. But for straight men, they’re not only getting that sexually different mentality from one person, they’re getting it from two. Or for the few who are secure enough to do it with another man, they’re dabbling with the potential arousal of being sexual with other men. The taboo of it can be hot, even if you’re for all intents and purposes straight.
It’s probably a trope, in the sense that gay men are more sexually explorative than straight men, and that’s only because we weren’t raised with a sexual roadmap that spells out exactly what to do. We have always been more willing to explore our baser instincts because, while straight people are told how to have a sex life, we’ve largely been left to our own devices. Within our community’s void of Sex Ed expectations, gay sex can be primal, animalistic. It’s untethered to societal expectations. And I like it that way. Asking whether threesomes are a gay trope is irrelevant because we’d just ask, “why stop at three?”
“Even with Kristen Bell, Ben Platt, and Allison Janney”Wait a minute, it’s bad even though it has the guy who ruined the Evan Hanson movie?
Ben Platt is also still an unconvincing 16 year old in this
As when the first trailer came out, I’m thinking that this is basically a feature length Ross and Emily’s Wedding in Friends.
This seems perfect for watching on Prime with some wine and assorted cheeses.
“Going to your friends’ weddings is awful” seems to be a really common theme in modern narrative, and… I guess I don’t get it. When I was at the age where my friends were getting married, I went to half a dozen or so of them, and they were all fine? Like, nothing spectacular, but they weren’t horrible disasters. I guess weddings where everything’s fine don’t make for good narrative, but the whole “weddings are awful” thing seems to be creeping into reality.
Most of my friends’ weddings were full-tilt blowouts where I caught up with high school or college friends I hadn’t seen in a while. I definitely don’t remember dreading any of them. One guy was marrying a woman we couldn’t stand but that hardly got in our way. We weren’t going home with her.
I’ve been to a lot of weddings that have ranged from the bride and groom insisting everyone play flip at the reception to a swanky wedding on the beaches of Mexico with no expenses spared. And I agree. Vast majority of weddings are uneventful (and IMO fun) and people who truly don’t want to be there either aren’t invited to begin with, don’t come, or exit early. Because most people (at least most people I know) understand that a wedding is a celebration of the couple and not about them and make the best of whatever the night is.But there’s no real entertainment factor there I guess.
If I pretended this movie came out in 1997 I’d give it an A+ for gay inclusivity. But it’s 2022, and not only did the movie indulge in the grand tradition of shoehorning as much diversity as possible into its gay characters (see: The Family Stone), it amped up some stereotypes so tired they aren’t even funny anymore. Did anyone else notice Paul reading a book generically titled “Musical Theater”? There was no context for this. There was no mention of him being an aspiring actor. It was just, gay = Musical Theater. Which is unfortunate because Allison Janey and Kristen Bell are both very vocal allies of our community, both who seemed to be grinning their way through a film they just realized might kill their careers. It’s also unfortunate for the film because the scenes with the gay characters, hollow and undeveloped as they were, served up its only few laughs. With a smidge better writing the disastrous threesome scene could have been hilarious, but then it wouldn’t have jibed with the tone the film was going for, which itself was all over the map.In fact, if that scene had been better fleshed out and the rest of the film went for that sort of raunchy tone a la Bridesmaids and The Hangover it could have been laugh-out-loud funny with only a few script edits, even amid its void of character development. Instead we got elements of Schitt’s Creek, CW-esque love triangles, and a few scenes written by someone who clearly watched a lot of Will & Grace.I don’t know how Amazon goes about releasing its movies, but The People We Hate at a Wedding is exactly why test screenings exist. With a few tweaks it could have been funny, or at the very least, not offensive. True, test screenings can dumb great films down to the status quo, but let’s be real, this never set out for greatness. When all you’re producing is a cheesy romcom, test screenings work. This clearly didn’t have one