Since catching a promotional preview of "Wedding Crashers" a couple of weeks ago, I've had the same conversation several times. The person or persons ask me whether I've seen it, and I say yes, a grin beginning to form on my face. They ask how it is, and I say it's indecently hilarious, the grin now a smile. They say, "Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are in it, right?" and I say, "Yes, and Christopher Walken - as if further enticement were needed." I'm chuckling by now, and they start to believe it is funny; yet almost every time, I get the distinct feeling they don't quite dare.
This is how screwed-up American screen comedy has been allowed to become. After a couple of decades of gross, lousy movies - especially unholy comedy franchises featuring the creepy, ego-swollen likes of David Spade, Chris Farley, Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider - comedy as a commodity has grown rightfully suspect. It doesn't help when even essentially benign comic presences, such as the ubiquitous and reliably hilarious Will Ferrell, frequently fail to make movies that are actually good ("Anchorman," though reasonably well supplied with funny stuff, had approximately as much follow-through as an hour and a half of "Saturday Night Live" sketches).
It does help when you know that the stellar practitioners are smart. Owen Wilson, the blond Texas dude with matinee-idol features rendered in Silly Putty, is not only a deft comedian possessed of crackerjack timing and an antic wistfulness - he's helped write the screenplays of such intellectually adventurous, aesthetically complex movies as "Bottle Rocket," "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" (all directed by fellow Texan Wes Anderson). The very notion of casting him opposite the equally savvy Ben Stiller (whose groundbreaking early-'90s sketch show was the most grievously overlooked TV comedy event since the early-'80s "Buffalo Bill"), as supermodels competing for beauty and brainlessness in "Zoolander," was enough to turn theaters showing that movie into high-peril hyperventilation zones.
And Vince Vaughn: Seeming always to be shaking off the aftereffects of a killer bender, towering 6-foot-whatever even as he moves through space in a perpetual slouch, the perennial class clown in flight from being an overachiever, he inspires simultaneous awe and a sense of conspiratorial collegiality. When he shows up in a cameo role (as he does - with Ben Stiller - in "Anchorman"), you know it's going to be a golden moment. When he's in it for the long haul - as, initially, in the epochmaking "Swingers," with and by Jon Favreau - you know he's going to cast and hold a spell for the duration. He can do it in noncomedies, too: as Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant's mystifying mummy-redo of "Psycho"; as the big-sky serial killer in "Clay Pigeons" (opposite Owen Wilson's brother Scott); above all as the Gotham limo driver discovering reluctant, penitential heroism in himself in the bewilderingly shortchanged "Return to Paradise."
So here are these two guys and a premise: Have them play divorce negotiators whose summer project is to crash as many weddings as possible, with a view toward bedding unattached female guests in the sentimental sidewash of the occasion. They arrive with specious identities, deep-cover backstories and a scientifically thorough gameplan for the campaign. They're diabolical about it, but they're not evil. Everybody has a good time; indeed, everybody has a demonstrably much better time than they would have if these two zany celebrants hadn't insinuated themselves aboard the matrimonial cruiseship for the fun and games, all the fun and games.
The joy of scamming is infectious, and sustained through a spirited montage of multiethnic glee: an Italian wedding, a Bollywood wedding, a Jewish wedding. The narrative locks in only when the boys venture into Washington, D.C., aristocracy with the yacht-club nuptials of Treasury Secretary Christopher Walken's daughter. Walken has two other daughters, played by Rachel McAdams and Isla Fisher, with whom Wilson and Vaughn, respectively, are soon in deeper (that is not a pun!) than they bargained for. The quasi-Kennedy-clan wackiness of the ensuing weekend is a somewhat uneven business (McAdams has a fiancé from hell whose sociopathic awfulness strains credibility even within the parameters of an incredible romp, and there's a formulaic pottymouth granny who seems to have wandered in from a Sandler/Farley/Spade movie). It's also a diminution that the script somewhat sidelines the reliably dominant Vaughn in the final reels to concentrate on the emerging warm-and-cuddliness of Wilson and the sweet-faced McAdams (who kept reminding me of "Lost"'s Evangeline Lilly, who, of course, I couldn't help wishing were there instead).
Still, a gladsome occasion, of which people should not deprive themselves in this cinematically lean season. Be warned, though - or heartened, depending on your disposition - that the R-rated "Wedding Crashers" manfully eschews the safe-playing taboos of your standard gutless, PG13 "grossout" comedy and goes for the gusto. Some really great-looking gusto.[[In-content Ad]]
