Altman's ambitious film is sadly one of his less successful. A WEDDING is extraordinarily self-indulgent, which is really saying something in light of this great filmmaker's astonishingly uneven career.
The setting is a wedding between the daughter of a southern parvenu family and the scion of a clan that is a combination of old money and Mafia. Altman trots more than 50 characters across the screen in what must have been an attempt to prove that he could top the feat he achieved with the 24
stars he used in NASHVILLE. In this case, though, more is less. So many people appear onscreen in so many snippets of stories that not only is it difficult to care about anyone, it's hard to remember who they are. The movie has no narrative thrust, coming across as a ragged collection of
occasionally amusing scenes. This is social satire delivered with a shotgun blast.
That great gray goddess of Hollwood films, Lillian Gish, makes her 100th film appearance, but gets killed off far too early. Arnaz, the groom, is set to marry Amy Stryker, the bride with conspicuous braces. Stryker's sister Mia Farrow has already had an affair with Arnaz and is pregnant by him.
Stryker's mother is Carol Burnett. She is bored with husband Paul Dooley (an Altman favorite who played Wimpy in POPEYE) and has a sexual liaison with Arnaz's uncle, McCormick. Arnaz's mother is Van Pallandt, a confirmed heroin addict. The wedding coordinator is Geraldine Chaplin, a lesbian (how
amusing!), and John Cromwell is the senile priest who forgets his lines and is so myopic that he speaks to a corpse and wonders why his remarks go unanswered. Perhaps the movie's best moment goes to Howard Duff, a lech and a lush of a doctor. At one point late in the film, during a major dramatic
scene, we hear him far off-screen, two floors below, very quietly reply when asked if he wants his glass refilled: "Just to the brim, please!" It's the most thrown-away of all great throwaway lines in the movies.
