Dream cast buoys up loopy family comedy

“THE BIG Wedding’s” stellar cast puts on quite a diverting show.

Talk about an all-star cast, “The Big Wedding” topbills a baker’s dozen of popular screen luminaries, including the Robert De Niro, the Diane Keaton, Katherine Heigl, Susan Sarandon, Amanda Seyfried, Robin Williams—and then some! It’s a dream stellar team meant to appeal to a wide age range of viewers, the better to get the profitable family crowd watching—and laughing.

Instructively, however, something seems to have gone a tad wrong along the way to the film’s denouement, because the movie isn’t the big blockbuster it planned to be.

Don’t  blame it on the production’s stellar cast—they give the movie everything they’ve got! So, what could have made the film falter instead of fly?

“The Big Wedding” is obviously about a nuptial ceremony, specifically involving the adopted son of Keaton and De Niro (Ben Barnes), who’s getting married to Seyfried’s character.

Best friend

Much less obviously, it turns out that De Niro and Keaton’s own marriage has long gone kaput, and his real squeeze is Keaton’s best friend, played by Susan Sarandon. This may be an unusual state of affairs, but the principal players have long gotten used to it.

Trouble is, the groom’s birth mother, who’s Latin-American, Roman Catholic and thus conservatively religious to a fault, doesn’t know anything about it, so it’s injudiciously decided that,  for just a couple of days, De Niro and Keaton will pretend to still be lovingly married, just to keep up appearances.

But, where does that leave Sarandon’s character, who now has to  pretend to be “invisible” while the visiting mamma is in town—?! Expectedly, she chafes at the bit and feels hurt and used, but she eventually decides to play along—for  a couple of days.

Sex kitten

Thematically, however, it’s at this point that the film’s plotting goes awry, with the introduction of the visiting birth mother’s daughter—who turns out to be a hot-to-trot sex kitten!

She looks rather meek, but when she gets attracted to De Niro’s other son (Topher Grace), she makes sure he knows it by aggressively “attacking” him beneath the tablecloth at a family dinner!

In addition, she takes it all off and seduces him to skinny-dip with her—the better, perhaps, to make the nuptials a “double-wedding” event!

All this is meant to heat up the movie’s storytelling, but it comes so far out of left field that it perplexes viewers with its inherent contradiction: The birth mother is resolutely conservative, but her own daughter is a libidinally liberated firecracker?

It may look like a lot of fun and games, but it just won’t wash, because it compromises the movie’s believability to a distracting degree, and keeps the production from “organically” achieving its slam-bang finale.

That really is too bad, because the film’s stellar cast otherwise puts on quite a diverting show—even if Robin Williams doesn’t do as well as expected in his cameo role as the loopy priest assigned to officiate over the freaky family’s crazy, mixed-up nuptials!