Out At The Wedding

Alex (Andrea Marcellus) is too scared to tell her family that she is engaged to Dana, a man (Mystro Clark) who is half American African, half Jewish, because she fears that they might be prejudiced. Instead she has told her fiancé her family are dead when they are very much alive and living in North Carolina. What is more, they are preparing for her little sister, Jeannie’s (Desi Lydic) wedding - a sister who has constantly stolen Alex’s boyfriends in the past.

Alex and her gay best friend Jonathan (Charlie Schlatter) go to the wedding together to give each other moral support and due to misunderstanding, a fellow guest misinterprets Jonathan’s avowal of gayness for him saying that Alex is instead, and since her boyfriend is called Dana, it all seems to fit. This in turn leads to endless comical permutations.

Complicate matters further by the fact that Jeannie goes to stay with her elder sister in town and Alex and Jonathan see the only way out of this predicament is to lie still further and produce a lesbian girlfriend, Risa (Cathy DeBuono) who can pretend to be her lover. The problem is that Jeannie has been in the closet all her life and she and Risa promptly fall in love. Into all of this mess walk Dana’s parents...and things start to become really compliated.

This is an amiable farce, played at breakneck speed with broad performances by one and all that add to the film’s enormous charm. Friedlander knows well how to get the best out of his performers and Paula Goldberg's screenplay is witty and sharp. I think that the film’s great strength is the way in which it portrays the gay and lesbian community as just another part of the rich tapestry of life, not as anything different or special. It is a film that truly belongs in the mainstream theatres not in some niche alternative theatre land.

It zips along at a cracking pace and keeps you smiling all the way through, playing out like a modern version of a Jack Lemmon/Billy Wilder classic. Miss out on this wedding at your peril.