Matrimony Month(s): My Big Fat Greek Wedding and the Resurgence of "Traditional" Cinematic Romance

The 90s brought about something of a sea change in romantic movies.  Pretty Women led the charge, and Cindarella – sometimes with a fresh coat of feminist paint as in “Ever After – emerged as a fresh role model.  If the 80s were all about individualism, then the 90’s brought about a resurgence of traditional romance, with My Big Fat Greek Wedding leading the charge.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding is as traditional a movie marriage plot can get and yet it is ostensibly about rejecting tradition…at least at first.  Toula is a lonely spinster stuck working at her parent’s Greek restaurant.  She falls for a regular customer, but her true motivation is independence – from her parent’s traditional values, from the pressure of marrying a Greek boy, from the expectation that she’ll be working at the family diner all her life.  Toula breaks free, taking classes, cutting her hair, and marrying a WASPy teacher…and marries him in a traditional Greek ceremony for which her fiancé has to convert.  

My Big Fat Greek Wedding’s opinion on familial closeness is an odd one to be sure.  While Toula is allowed to have a makeover and learn how to do data entry, she can’t break away from the warm, kooky embrace of her family entirely for then the movie would become a drama.   She ends up living next door to her parents, sending her daughter off to Greek school even though she herself hated it (and married a man who was most pronouncedly not Greek).  Toula must progress in order to regress, and the movie rewards her with an attractive bedmate for her efforts.

That’s not to say that the virtually tensionless film doesn’t have its fluffy charm; Nia Vardalos and John Corbett have fun chemistry that makes them a believable and rootworthy couple, and the assortment of greek stereotypes that stock Toula’s family are generally inoffensive if often cringeworthy.  That’s enough for a romantic comedy to soar, but what works in it works.  And in a lot of ways it’s refreshing (if completely creepy) to watch Ian be the one to mold his identity after what Toula wants and needs in a mate.   If you turn your brain off it’s a fine, sweet little character study and romantic comedy.

Under deeper inspection, though, it kind of all falls apart into a froth of whisper-thin clichés.     Ian doesn’t seem to exist as anything beyond a paper construct and sacrifices too much to please Toula’s family.  No wonder six years later they’re living next door and his daughter’s following in her mother’s reluctant steps.    The marriage is anti-compromise, and one can only imagine how it’ll still be functioning in the upcoming sequel, and for all of the sweetness the original serves up, it still has time to circulate a basket filled with stale gender roles.