Muriel's Wedding

P.J. Hogan’s Australian film Muriel Wedding’s (1994) is one of the premiere exhibits of what honesty and comprehensiveness can do to what is ostensibly a genre product. Only in the most shallow of terms can this be called a chick flick as it’s more a film that simply appropriates those tropes in order to stage a psychological drama of womanhood as it corresponds to the awkward and callow Muriel (Toni Collette), a woman so desperate to be considered beautiful that she acquiesces to external definitions of beauty and accomplishment. And while this merely demonstrates the superficial showiness that weddings and marriage can attain if wrongly desired, and thus the superficiality behind “chick flicks” in their most rigid definition, it is integral precisely because Muriel believes in the one-to-one correlation between marriage/happiness.

When mediocrity becomes so conditioned in the interiority of Muriel’s character that she begins to compulsively lie, fabricating untruths in the attempt to win friends and respect, she loses her individuality. When she first meets Rhonda (Rachel Griffiths), she constructs a false engagement to a man to keep from revealing the truth that haunts her—that she is pointedly, inflexibly alone. And while we see that this shifting of character is not entirely bad since there are numerous negative personality traits she has that have damaged her socially, it’s still a fundamental change in her character and thus is one that lessens her dedication to her individuality.

For her part, Rhonda possesses a volatile personality, one that is willing to lash out savagely to avenge the wrongs of adolescence to hilarious results, as when she honestly yet spitefully reveals the truth about another’s bridesmaids, but that same instability is cast inward and internalized when Rhonda becomes aware that she has cancer on her spine which dehabilitates her early vitality and leads her into depression. Thus, we start to see Muriel and Rhonda each invert their depression, with Muriel projecting outward after years of internalizing and Rhonda internalizing after years of externalizing.

The titular wedding sequence chronicles the giddy and oblivious Muriel, who’s so attuned to her need to upstage her friends’ disparagements at her spouselessness that she commits to an artificial marriage, one designed merely to satisfy country politics so that her new spouse, David, can participate for Australia in the swimming meets at the 2000 summer Olympics. In committing to this artifice of a marriage, though, Muriel loses Rhonda’s respect for her, as she surrenders to her dream rather than her individuality. Yet at the wedding we begin seeing glimpses of Muriel’s natural beauty that is only countered when her honest giddiness transforms her beauty into pointed naïveté, trusting in the dream to the detriment of her integrity. Yet her eventual shedding of the narcissistic desire for marriage leads her, and the film, to a greater awakening, one that instills in the whole affair a sanctity of friendship that is largely absent from the marriage.

My singular fault in this film is Muriel’s decision to bed David. While such a scene suggests reciprocity and genuine communication between her and David when he formerly despised her, as when he secured Muriel and himself separate bedrooms and thus neutralized any thoughts of intimacy, the two later come to understanding about each other. Both of them understand the other’s game and Muriel’s naïveté is revealed to be her way of consciously hiding all of her transgressions, so that we see the fragility at work in her mind. Yet while the sex affirms the attraction of marriage, it is also paradoxically negated by her realization that she must leave the marriage. At this point I am unsure whether this is a regressive or progressive gesture, as there’s some slippage in the connotations (does this mean there’s no longer a one-to-one correlation between sex and love for Muriel or is this merely a means to sanctifying the marriage before she realizes what she’s done?).

Still, this is the only flaw in the film, and it’s one that is comfortably in my top 100 now as an embodiment of how to fashion a near-perfect film from the constraints of genre. This is one that only a film swap would have forced me to watch, and it’s one that will be suggested to others so that they too may see a quality example of the “genre.”

Muriel's Wedding: 9.5/10