Rom-Com Purgatory: “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”
My girlfriend is working on a project about romantic comedies, and as such she’s had to watch a lot of them. I agreed to sit through them with her. These are some of the terrible things I learned…
Henry David Thoreau said that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Pink Floyd went one further, and said that “quiet desperation is the English way.”
Whilst it’s never wise to generalise an entire people, it seems fair, based on “Four Weddings,” that quiet desperation is English writer/director Richard Curtis’ way, and he’s not shy about who knows it.
I’ve had to watch some genuine shite in my ongoing rom-com project — a number of films were so bad that I didn’t even have anything to say about them and didn’t bother writing them up. 1999’s “Forces of Nature,” for example, was so baffling and tedious that watching it until the end credits instilled the sort of existential despair that left me unable to blink without effort, much less type.
“Four Weddings,” on the other hand, is remembered as a classic. I could watch this film safe in the knowledge that it wouldn’t feature cringing jokes about child rape or the sort of blithe mysoginy that seems to riddle other efforts in the genre. I might even enjoy it.
Except I didn’t, because this is a movie that features cringing jokes about child rape and hates women with the fury of a Puritan corset salesman.
The story begins with Hugh Grant — young, pretty Hugh Grant, before the weight of interminable romantic comedies crushed his spirit and gave his blue eyes the distant stare of a traumatised combat veteran — late for a wedding. Grant has admitted that he was playing the lead character as a thinly veiled imitation of writer/director Richard Curtis, which is interesting and also lets us know that Curtis is an insufferable wanker. At the wedding, Grant meets Andy McDowell, who is generously billed as an actress in the credits but is really just a sort of listless, marauding orifice for the rest of the movie.
Grant and McDowell are immediately attracted to each other, but don’t get to act on it until they wind up in the same hotel, at which point Grant is cornered in the bar by an old Etonian type who tells amusing stories about being raped at boarding school. I wish I was making that up — one of the “funny” lines in this film is about a child being sodomised.
I don’t really want to dwell on this one line, but I feel I must. Whilst the past is another country (and so is the British boarding school system) this can’t really be put down to a joke that hasn’t aged well. Consider Harvey Keitel’s loathsome pimp in “Taxi Driver,” attempting to sell a repulsed Robert DeNiro a pubescent girl for sex. That was fifteen years before this movie, and the whole point was that the audience were meant to be disgusted. Here, we have a man admitting that the older boys would rape him while he was in school, and we’re supposed to chuckle along.
With the audience in a suitably romantic mood from all the talk of anally raping a child (“Five stars!” -Roman Polanski) Andy McDowell rescues Hugh Grant and tries to seduce him, except that he’s so repressed that she has to kiss him three times before he’ll reciprocate, even though he likes her and is already in her hotel room.
Having parted ways, Hugh Grant finds himself a few weeks later at another wedding, where Andy McDowell is once again a guest. Unfortunately, McDowell reveals that she herself is now engaged, and then fucks Hugh Grant anyway because Richard Curtis doesn’t understand women, trust, healthy relationships or morality. As if this weren’t questionable enough behaviour from McDowell, she then descends to a level of psychological torture that makes you suspect she normally communicates through a tape recorder in an old puppet— she takes Hugh Grant wedding dress shopping so he can judge how she’ll look when she marries the man she just cheated on with him.
For no real reason, the two end up discussing sexual histories and McDowell’s revelation that she’s been on more men’s cocks than athletic supports causes Grant to chase after her and confess that he’s hopelessly in love with her. Once again, what this says about Richard Curtis is best left to professionals.
As though McDowell’s character wasn’t already portrayed as enough of a heartless bitch, she then bafflingly invites Hugh Grant to her wedding. Equally implausibly, Grant agrees. Whilst there, one of Grant’s social circle (and one half of a gay couple) drops dead.
I’ve watched enough rom-coms now to be able to play bingo at home. I can watch a film I’ve never even heard of and pretty often fill my card. One of the squares I like to include is called “Gays aren’t people.” This is because almost all rom-coms feature a supporting gay character who doesn’t seem to have an internal life or any real feelings at all — they’re just there to be sassy or “amusingly” camp or as a shoulder to cry on for the proper (ie: straight) characters. “Four Weddings” does some top class insensitivity in this regard, in that there is a prominent gay couple who are used as a sounding board for Hugh Grant’s heartaches without any acknowledgement that they, perhaps, have bigger problems to surmount. Grant is allowed to be heartbroken that Andy McDowell is marrying someone else, and then bitches about it to two people who are in love but can’t marry each other.
Assuming Grant’s character is meant to be about thirty, it means that within his lifetime, his two gay friends could have been locked up simply for being in a relationship in the first place. Still, one suspects we’re meant to applaud “Four Weddings” for having a gay couple and treating them as normal human beings. Maybe we should — Christ knows Hollywood was still using homosexuality as a punchline right up until [*Checks notes*] the moment I typed this sentence. Still, it feels a little galling that we’re stuck with Hugh Grant as a protagonist when John Hannah and Simon Callow are much more interesting characters.
Then, as I say, Simon Callow’s character dies and the film manages its only moment of real emotion. Except that it’s stolen. John Hannah, as Callow’s partner, reads W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” as a eulogy. It’s beautiful, but then it should be, as W. H. Auden wrote it and Richard Curtis just copied it into the script verbatim. That means that in a film entirely under the control of Richad Curtis, the best script work was done by a man who’d been dead for twenty years at the time of filming.
Again: Nothing is really made of the fact that Hannah’s character must be introduced as Callow’s “friend” rather than his partner. Although Hannah does a fine job of reading the poem and portraying stifled agony, a modern audience longs for him to break off mid-way and scandalise all those assembled with a demand for some sort of recognition that the man they’re burying was more than just his friend. But once again, this is Richard Curtis, this is quiet, English desperation, and the film continues with the interminable saga of Hugh Grant’s love life.
Terrified of dying alone after realising the transience of life, Grant decides to settle and marry an ex-girlfriend we were introduced to in a previous scene, despite the fact that she’s stupid and their relationship was clearly a bad idea. This, once again, feels like a muted cry for help from Richard Curtis rather than any sort of believable plot point. In the spirit of this utter implausibility, Grant has apparently invited Andy McDowell to the wedding. When she arrives, she mentions that her own marriage quickly fell apart, most likely due to her being an emotionally empty, promiscuous harpy. Although she doesn’t say as much, so that might be me reading too deeply into things.
Oh, somewhere around here, another woman who has been Hugh Grant’s friend admits that she’s always suffered a hopeless, helpless, unrequited yearning for him, which is proof that Richard Curtis both fears and mistrusts women, but will also write a script where they fall at his on-screen surrogate’s feet. In another time and place, Richard Curtis wouldn’t be directing movies but rather appearing on Fox News as a “men’s rights advocate” with a Jordan Peterson tattoo.
Hugh Grant realises that he’s still in love with Andy McDowell after the two nights and one dress-shopping excursion they spent together, but is too repressed and English to do anything about it so goes ahead with his wedding cermony. This sets up the ending as a fantastic, gut-punch tragedy that might have had some artistic integrity, until Grant’s brother interrupts the wedding and forces him to admit he loves someone else. Grant’s fiance punches him (deservedly) and then he has a tearful reunion with McDowell, a woman he knows from experience will aimiably cheat on a fiance. This means nothing to a man as stupid as him, they kiss in the rain and, according to a post-credits montage, have a kid. The end.
I’ve speculated for a while that many rom-coms are, in fact, some sort of elaborate financial scam. A way for studios to launder money, or else write things off for tax reasons. “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” however, was shot on a very low budget. With the fraud angle ruled out, it’s safe to say that it’s a genuine work of art, except not in the way that it thinks it is. It isn’t a charming comedy (there are exactly two good lines in the whole film, both of which are stepped on, both by Curtis’ direction if Hugh Grant is to be believed) so much as it’s a cinematic cry for help — the desperate wail of a soul so repressed and alone that it longs for (and invents) the female equivalent of the Magic Negro; someone who will swoop in and solve all of his romantic problems without ever being a real person.
Curtis’ loneliness — or his unhappiness in his relationship — can be traced directly to the fact that he doesn’t understand women. Nobody who wrote this film can possibly understand women. McDowell’s character is downright evil. A preening sociopath who invites her affair to shop for wedding dresses and is never once shown to have any sort of intrinsic personality aside from an insatiable lust for male flesh and an utter disregard for their feelings. She is the succubus as romantic heroine; vagina dentata on a pedestal.
We perhaps shouldn’t blame Richard Curtis for not understanding women and relationships, however, as he’s clearly not in touch with his own emotions. If Grant is to be believed that his performance is just a Curtis impression, Curtis is so painfully stunted in his emotional development that he’s little more than a bag of tics and neuroses and perpetual, flustered embarrassment at his own existence. It makes “Four Weddings” feel like a tragedy, or perhaps a horror film.
Ultimately, the only plus point of the whole film is that it shows how far men, for all their failings, have come in beginning to understand and connect with their emotions in the last twenty-five years. Because if anyone in 2018 behaved like a Curtis hero from 1994, women wouldn’t drag them to bed. They’d send them to therapy.