The flipside of the traditional values renaissance brought to life by movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding was the anti-traditionalism brought to life by movies as diverse as the critically reviled The Next Best Thing and the critically acclaimed Muriel’s Wedding.
Muriel’s Wedding is about as anti-matrimonial as you can get for a movie that’s almost entirely about the marital status of its main character. Muriel Heslop, in the performance that launched Toni Collette’s career, is a lonely, ostracized single woman. The last single person in her social group, she daydreams to the tune of ABBA about getting married and finally making her abusive politician father happy with her and her shallow, social-climbing friends envious. Desperate and impulsive, she’s following in her unhappy mother’s footsteps, shoplifting shoes for her friends’ weddings, when she impulsively decides to steal a blank check from her father’s office to follow her friends on a cruise, where she remeets the free-spirited Rhonda, also from Porpoise Spit, who also went to school with Muriel. Rhonda and Muriel become fast friends, and after the cruise they run away to Sydney to start a new life. But even as Muriel starts blossoming, dating, changing her name to Mariel and working in a video store, she can’t escape bridal fever. Trying on dresses alone like an addict tucking into a fix, she uses the video store’s large overhead monitors to replay Charles and Diana’s wedding again and again. Rhonda eventually has a health crises, and Muriel is forced to call her father for help and money. The two women are separated; Rhonda, paralyzed due to her cancer surgery, has been muted and lives with her mother and the pity friendship of the rest of their old circle. Meanwhile, Muriel is engaged at her father’s request to marry a champion swimmer who’s using her as a trophy wife. Muriel finally gets her wedding, but there’s a problem – the marriage that occurs afterward is bereft of companionship and joy, and she finds herself replaying video of it as she sits, alone, in her bedroom while her closeted husband swims laps in their enormous pool. It takes her mother’s death to make her realize that marriage isn’t everything, and that some things are more important than walking down the aisle to ABBA on your wedding day.
Muriel’s Wedding is something of an answer to the fluffy world suggested by Nia Vardalis, where a woman can get her man, her career, and keep her happy family together all by getting a makeover and learning how to use a computer. Muriel’s struggle against depression isn’t fixed by outside forces but by several enormous decisions and sea changes she undertakes herself. Rhonda’s lighthearted influence and the sight of her mother’s suffering inspire her, too, but Muriel can’t let go of her dreams to live in the richer now of her life until she finally comes to accept that she is her own savior.
Marriage is treated as a last step toward adulthood by Muriel’s friends and by her father, who thinks that perhaps if Muriel does him proud he’ll finally be able to advance his political career, which has suffered in his presumed connection with his family’s dowdy, dead-eyed existence. And yet all of the married people in Muriel’s Wedding are downright infantile. Muriel’s friends, with their affairs and their gossip, are shown to be a thousand times more horrible than vivacious Rhonda, whose promiscuous lifestyle garners much comment from them; their spouses dawdle along behind them, occasionally stopping to roll their eyes and cheat. Muriel’s parents are locked in an unhappy union defined by embarrassment and shame, which eventually kills Muriel’s mother in the middle of a shoplifting binge. Mass, illegal consumption of mass-produced products provide a motif; they’re seen as a way to ice over the voids and bruises a loveless life leave behind. The only exception to the rule is the music of ABBA, Muriel’s patron saints, whose music ultimately draws her to Rhonda. But even then, once she has Rhonda’s friendship she no longer needs ABBA and only returns to their sugary embrace for her ghastly wedding march.
Muriel’s Wedding still stands strong almost twenty years later as a wonderful example of dramatic comedy, of what happens when you take romantic comedy expectations and turn them onto their heads. Muriel meets her waterloo in leopard print, with her dignity intact and her sense of self newborn, and without a man beside her or waiting in the wings. May we all be as lucky to be self-reliant on our own day of judgment.
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