The War of the Brides

I’m going to steal an idea from Mlle Campos and offer up a quiz to those of you who are considering seeing Bride Wars. 

1. Do you have trouble tolerating extended discussions about wedding planning ? e.g., varieties of invitation stationery, designer dresses, bridal tanning packages, etc.?

2. Are you easily irritated by the sound of shrieking?

3. Are you a guy?

If you answered Yes to any of the above questions, you may want to head over to the next theater and check out Gran Torino.

But if you, like me, enjoy the Style network’s excellent wedding-planner show, Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? and you don’t mind checking your brain at the door, Bride Wars might be just the thing to distract you from your latest bout of seasonal affective disorder.

Now, bear in mind that this movie was released in January for a reason. It won’t be up for any Golden Globes come next year’s awards season. The plot is bizarre, yet predictable. The actresses are far too good for their script. The secondary-character clichés abound (the tough-as-nails wedding planner, the ambiguously gay assistant, the uninterested-in-wedding-planning grooms). But that’s okay. This movie isn’t trying to be anything more than a popcorn flick that gets women to fork over $9.75 on a Friday girls’-night-out. And given how many blah “guy movies” have hit the multiplex lately, that’s just fine with me.

If you’ve seen the Bride Wars trailers, you’re familiar with the movie’s “high-concept” premise. Two lifelong best friends get engaged within days of each other. They’ve both dreamed since childhood of having a June wedding at the Plaza. They go to a wedding planner, who accidentally books both of their weddings for the same time slot, in different rooms. Either they’ll have to have competing weddings, or one of the friends will have to change her venue. What’s more important ? a lifetime of sisterhood, or being a princess for a day?

Unsurprisingly, they both go the princess route. Each blames the other for not changing venues, and they very maturely act on their anger by playing a series of pranks on each other. The pranks run from the tame (Emma has chocolates delivered to the dieting Liv) to the mean but fixable (Liv switches out Emma’s spray-on tanner with a bright orange hue) to the unforgivable (which I won’t describe for fear of spoilers). The writers also somehow contrive a strip-club dance-off between the brides (hey, whatever it takes to get the straight guys into the theater, I guess). It’s like watching a very long episode of Friends, except Rachel is the only character, and there are two of her.

It’s hard to suspend disbelief far enough to accept that two sane, intelligent, adult women would behave this way, especially since Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway are playing Liv and Emma, respectively, as fully three-dimensional people ? the kind of confident, complicated women you want to root for, even when the script has them literally clawing at each other. But if you can pull that off, and you enjoy watching good actresses wear great clothes while sipping champagne and shopping for wedding dresses (I know I do), you may want to give the movie a shot.

Bride Wars falls into that squishy, non-romantic-comedy-yet-still-funny-and-targeted-exclusively-at-young-women genre previously occupied by The Devil Wears Prada and Legally Blonde (both of which, I’m happy to admit, I own on DVD). Bride Wars doesn’t compare to either of those, and won’t be taking up space on my shelf anytime soon. But it’s a sufficiently fun way to spend a couple of hours.