A Wedding

Black Humor at Its Best
Altman's technique of interweaving plots is perfectly suited to weddings, one-time events where participants, all with their own axes to grind, clash. Filmed in pre-politically correct 1978, this film simply gets better with age. The all-star cast is a joy, especially Lillian Gish and Mia Farrow, who plays a pubescent nymphomaniac.

Unlike Short Cuts or Ready to Wear, but like Nashville and Gosford Manor, this is an Altman film where it all comes together and works. Good stuff.

My favorite Robert Altman film . . .
It is. I could go downstairs right now and watch "A Wedding"--for the upteenth time--and enjoy it all over again. I LOVE this film--even more than Altman's masterpiece, "Nashville". I saw "A Wedding" in the theater when I was a teenager--and, of course, I adored Carol Burnett (still do), so I had to see it. And I believe it was the first Altman film I ever saw, and from that moment on, I was a devoted fan of his.

"A Wedding" has over 40 main characters and lots of plots and subplots, but in a nutshell, it's about a young couple's wedding day that brings together both their families. Ms. Burnett plays the mother of the bride, Tulip, and she's just perfect in the role, which allows her to be hysterically funny and very dramatic. The legendary Lillian Gish plays the dying matriarch who remains upstairs in her bedroom throughout the entire film as various family members pay her a visit. Mia Farrow--in one of her best roles--plays Carol's daughter (the sister of the...

So close, yet so far
Altman's follow-up to NASHVIILE (after having done THREE WOMEN in between) promised to do for the American family and the class system what NASHVILLE itself did for pop culture and democracy. The film doesn't live up to the standard of the earlier film by a long shot, and is much too wild and woolly to suit its topic. Yet it does have some great moments of redemption.

The film explores an afternoon at the home of one of the great wealthy old families in Chicago--the Sloans--as Dino Corelli (Desi Arnaz, Jr.), the grandson of the family's elderly matriarch Netty (Lillian Gish), marries "Muffin" Brenner (Amy Stryker), the brace-faced daughter of a newly wealthy Kentucky trucking company owner. The scenes near the beginning of the wedding guests frantically trying to find bathrooms in the Sloan mansion after the ceremony are as good as anything Altman's ever done. But the film loses a great deal of focus after that: it seems to be missing a center (not enough is done with...

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