Starring two of America’s sweethearts, Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway, BRIDE WARS pits best friend against best friend in the Battle of The Same Wedding Day, Venue and Organizer.
“So, are you going to move your wedding date?” my best friend Sherwil asked me. She was holding my hand, as she usually does when we watch a movie.
“Are you going to move yours?” I countered.
We both thought for a while, before saying, at the same time, “Yeah.”
But that’s why we’ve been friends since 1990, when I began our beautiful friendship by whispering the answers to the Religion test she was taking too long to answer. We just don’t stand in the way of each other’s happiness. Yes, even if there’s just one piece of Belgian chocolate truffle left.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the case in Bride Wars. Starring two of America’s sweethearts, Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway, this movie pits best friend against best friend in the Battle of The Same Wedding Day, Venue and Organizer.
Liv (Hudson) and Emma (Hathaway) have shared and nurtured the dream of the perfect wedding since childhood. The movie’s big joke is that their perfect dreams are basically alike—to get married at the Plaza Hotel in June, with the services of the same famed wedding organizer Marion St. Claire (Candice Bergen)—and they get the same dream at the same time.
Like most best friends, Liv, a high-powered, aggressive lawyer, and Emma, a sweet, unassertive school teacher, have many things in common but are polar opposites. This makes them the perfect complement to each other—but only on good days. And their wedding day and the days that build up to it are so not included.
It makes for a delicious, but tricky movie concept. I mean, how do you make a film about two best friends fighting it out for a perfect wedding without making appear really shallow? Well, whatever the answer is, it’s not in Bride Wars, because this movie, for the most part, is all about the shallow.
“Your wedding better watch it,” Liv threatens Emma. “If I were your wedding, I would be sleeping with one eye open.” And thus begins a series of unbelievably mean events: Junk Food Sabotage, Operation: Spray Tan Orange, Code Name: Smurf Hair, Bridal Shower Hi-jack, and the winning Video Montage Switch.
In the end, however, as best friends are wont to do, they sort of manage to bring out the best in each other, never mind if it has them lying down on their wedding gowns, in the aisle, in front of hundreds of people, a few seconds before the wedding proper.
If it weren’t for Hudson and Hathaway and the millions of “Awww, shucks!” moments they’ve deposited in the audience’s pop culture databanks, I don’t think they would have pulled this off.
As a matter of fact, Bride Wars barely gets away with a lot of things, including the use of St. Claire’s perspective to tell the story. It is obvious that the movie is pretty much tongue-in-cheek about every girl’s not-so-closeted wedding day obsessions, but if the wedding organizer’s going to tell the story, well, let her be a big part of it! Unfortunately—and to the film’s great loss—Candice Bergen’s character just stands around pretty much the entire time.
Bride Wars is definitely no girl power flick either: Liv and Emma are horrendous to each other 90 percent of the time (if my best friend turned my hair blue on purpose days before the wedding, I think there’d be no looking back), and their girl friends are pretty much horrendous people too. They just watch Liv and Emma go at it, as if it gives them pleasure to watch the two be as miserable as they were. With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Of course, the film has a saving grace, the closing line: “Sometimes in life there really are bonds formed that can never be broken. Sometimes you really can find that one person who will stand by you no matter what; maybe you’ll find it in a spouse and celebrate it with your dream wedding, but there is also the chance that the one person you can count on for a lifetime, the one person who knows you, sometimes better than you know yourself, is the same person who’s been standing beside you all along.”
Ultimately, Bride Wars is not a chick flick. It’s a film about friendship. But only those who have real best friends—like a girl friend you can feel comfortable holding hands in a movie with, if you were a girl—would get it.
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