On and around My Best Friend's Wedding (2000)

I want to discuss My Best Friend's Wedding in relation to three associated topics: its relation to classic screwball comedy and the other recent attempts to rethink that genre in contemporary terms; its auteurist relationship with Muriel's Wedding; and the current widespread uses of gay characters in contemporary comedies. As this article will accordingly be more `around' than `on', I had better begin by saying plainly that I love the film: if not `profound' or in any of the more obvious ways `groundbreaking', it seems to me a flawless and progressive example of its genre, giving continuous delight. 1. Screwball ancient and modern We all recognize certain films as `screwball', yet the term requires definition; the simplest way to define it is to situate it between the `romantic' comedy and the `crazy' or `slapstick' comedy, as it clearly relates to both while remaining distinct from either, its distinctness arising perhaps from the ways in which it borrows and combines elements from each. McCarey provides the ideal touchstones, as he produced outstanding examples of all three categories: Duck Soup, the ideal crazy comedy, Love Affair or its remake An Affair to Remember the ideal romantic, and The Awful Truth among the greatest screwballs. At the heart of both `screwball' and `romantic' is the romantic couple, generally absent from or marginal to `crazy' (although Chaplin and Lloyd always had romantic `interests' their films are celebrated primarily for the comedians' performances, set-pieces and skills; although Laurel and Hardy might at a stretch be seen as a romantic couple, the stretch would be a very long one; and I don't think anyone would label the various courtships of Groucho and Margaret Dumont `romantic' exactly). This is why the distinction is not always clearcut. A rough but sufficiently accurate way of putting it might suggest that the romantic comedy is primarily about the construction of the ideal romantic couple, while the screwball comedy is primarily about liberation (and the couple it constructs is often very short of the romantic ideal--see, for example, Bringing up Baby or The Lady Eve--or Too Many Husbands, which audaciously constructs a threesome): the overthrow of social convention, of bourgeois notions of respectability, of traditional gender roles (the resolution of My Best Friend's Wedding is already clearly in view). This is precisely where `screwball' links to `crazy'--to the anarchy of the Marx Brothers, or the (often inadvertent) destruction of social norms, homes and property in Laurel and Hardy: plausibility is much less an issue in `screwball' than in `romantic'. The Awful Truth might be taken as the perfect midpoint between the two, `crazy' and `romantic' held meticulously in balance. The most interesting aspect of this movement toward liberation, the overthrow of norms, is the recurrent emphasis in screwball (the theme, one might claim, of the best screwballs) on the emancipation and empowerment of women. Hence The Awful Truth is essentially about (in Andrew Britton's words) `the chastisement of male presumption' and the progress of the couple toward equality. The most extreme instance--hence the closest of all the screwballs to `'crazy'--is of course Bringing up Baby, singlemindedly concerned with Cary Grant's liberation at the merciless hands of Katharine Hepburn, and culminating with faultless logic in that still potent image of the overthrow of patriarchy, the collapse of the dinosaur skeleton into 'nothing but a heap of old bones', to misquote Hepburn from earlier in the film. Other notable examples: The Lady Eve, Two-Faced Woman (the original version, not the bowdlerized horror currently available on video--see Richard Lippe on this in CineAction 35), and (on a lower level of achievement) Theodora Goes Wild and Too Many Husbands, in which Jean Arthur, despite having been compelled by the patriarchal legal system to choose between Fred MacMurray and Melvyn Douglas, ends up keeping them both. …