“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,” is a line from a poem by W.H. Auden that is read to express the character’s weariness in the irresistible “Four Weddings and a Funeral” (1994). It’s a rare moment of gravitas in this otherwise breezy romp – but it’s this interval from all the merriment we’re having that makes me love this film so much. It’s a pivotal moment in the story in which all the characters who seemed to be in a fog about why things are not working out for them have a moment of lucidity. At a time in my life that feels as if all the clocks have stopped, it’s necessary to make a virtue out of inevitability. “Four Weddings and a Funeral” is still the shimmering crowd pleaser I saw 26 years ago. It rings truer.
Charles – who is in his thirties living in London – seems to be caught in a seemingly endless routine of attending weddings with his group of friends who are all unattached – and to paraphrase the lyrics of the Gershwin tune that plays in the beginning, “They’re writing songs of love but not for them.” “What’s going here? Why am I always at weddings and never getting married?” Charles ponders at the prospect of perennial singlehood. He’s raffishly shy and afraid of commitment. We find out he’s had relationships in the past thanks to the trail of ex-girlfriends he runs into at the weddings – and how he’s managed to sabotage every courtship. At the first wedding we witness, Charles meets a fancily free American woman – Carrie – who catches his eye. He fumbles their introduction, but she turns the tables on him and does the seducing. They have a tryst that night yet she departs for the United States the following morning. It’s love at first sight. In the ceremonies that follow we will see them always be pulled apart from each other for one reason or another – and we will meet the rest of his friends and be involved in their vicissitudes, successes and failures – as if we ourselves were acquaintances at all these different affairs. Among the common guests at all of the weddings are Scarlett, Charles’ spunky roommate, his deaf brother David (who grounds Charles), the aristocratic and somewhat befuddled Tom (James Fleet), and his sister, Fiona, who is in love with Charles. “I’ve met the right chap but he’s not in love with me, and until I stop loving him no one else stands a chance,” she admits to him. The compass that provides an affectionate cue of Charles’ slow progress is the only settled couple – albeit closetted – Matthew and Gareth. The latter is a character out of a Shakespeare comedy – displaying bawdy humor and a lust for life, food and booze. There is an emphasis on the central relationship of Carrie and Charles, but the film is ultimately about the love story that is built around your friends.
The film turns on the device spelled for you in its title. Cleverly and wisely, it allegorically boils life down to a series of memorable events in which the characters interact. The narrative is divided into the four chapters which will contain all of the action. There’s an immutability and comfort to this pattern. A stark contrast to our current state lacking structure and full of incertitude. Each wedding has its own atmosphere and individuality – beautifully choreographed and edited – varying between rural yet grand settings and chic London. The funeral appropriately takes place next to a factory. There’s one scene that has always fascinated me for its brilliance. In close-ups we witness Charles fall in love with Carrie as she recounts the numerous sexual dalliances she’s had with previous men. She counts thirty-two. She’s so comfortable with who she is, and it blinds him.
This was the film that made Hugh Grant a household name – and he has the same appeal as that other famous actor with the same last name – Cary. He’s handsome, self-deprecating, self-aware. He stammers – and it only adds to the sex appeal and attractiveness. Kristin Scott Thomas as the best friend who loves him from afar is so electric that you only wish they would end up together. Simon Callow steals every scene as the raucous Gareth. The weak link is Andie McDowell as Carrie – yet she doesn’t ruin the festivities.
“Four Weddings and a Funeral” is worth attending.
Gareth: “I have a theory about love. Two people are in love, they live together, and then suddenly one day they run out of conversation. Totally. They can’t think of a single thing to say to each other. That’s it. Panic! Then suddenly it occurs to the chap there is a way out of the deadlock. He’ll ask her to marry him.”
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on Hulu, Amazon Prime, EPIX NOW, Sling TV, IMDb TV, The Roku Channel, hoopla, Vudu, Tubi, Pluto TV, EPIX and DIRECTV. Available to rent on Google Play, YouTube, iTunes, Vudu, FandangoNOW, and Apple TV.
Written by Richard Curtis
Directed by Mike Newell
Starring Hugh Grant, Andie MacDowell, Kristin Scott Thomas, Simon Callow, James Fleet, John Hannah, Charlotte Coleman, David Bower, Corin Redgrave and Rowan Atkinson
117 minutes
Director Mike Newell Reflects on Bringing “Four Weddings and a Funeral” to the Screen
“The script was lying on the desk of my agent’s secretary. I picked it up and was just looking at the front page when the secretary said: “That’s really funny.” I took it away and read it myself – and she was absolutely bang on. It was a very modest production. We were lucky the script was so watertight. The casting people introduced me to lots of actors I didn’t know. Because it was a British production, you didn’t feel overwhelmed by the need for stars. There was no ducking and weaving around egos: we simply cast the actors who were best for the roles. The low budget forced us to be innovative. In our tiny schedule, we had to have five big public occasions – four weddings and a funeral – involving hundreds of extras. Simply getting scenes done in any basic fashion was challenging. There was no time to discuss anything and yet the producer, writer and director seemed to need to do an awful lot of discussing, which I began to find frustrating. I kicked a lot of gravestones. They all seem to remember me being ill-tempered. I must say, I don’t remember it myself.
Richard Curtis is always very generous, saying that we put a degree of realism into the characters that had not necessarily been there on the page. We had to make these apparently gilded youths, three or four years out of Harrow and Oxford, feel acceptable to a general audience, and that required good casting. Hugh Grant’s character Charles was a commitment-phobic young man: the film came at a time when lots of boys weren’t jumping in. The story is about somebody who won’t look beyond the end of his nose becoming somebody who finds commitment. Hugh was brilliant at doing that. He’s a marvellous actor, tremendously hard-working and respects the word on the page. Opening in America first was absolutely the right thing to do. It stopped people thinking that this was just a small, worthless English film. We had a public preview in Santa Monica, the sort of thing people dread because the possibilities of humiliation are high. Usually, at the end of those occasions, you sit glumly over drinks, but this time we didn’t. When James Fleet, who played bumbling Tom, did that funny little trip on a staircase in the first 30 seconds, somebody in the audience laughed. It sent a message that it was OK to laugh at the dopey English – and they didn’t stop.” (theguardian.com)
“…The point of the whole film and why people put their arms round it is because it isn’t about romance, it’s about the blessings of friendship. It wasn’t conceivable that what happened on that movie would happen. No-one saw it coming. But it was happy. People didn’t feel like they needed to censure their own happiness. Today, it feels like we need to censure our laughter. We may laugh but then remind ourselves of huge looming challenges which aren’t laughing matters. 25 years ago times were lighter. The film was a perfect storm of actors, writers and creatives. It was like a French impressionist painting full of light. You want to be there, where the light is. Some people may say the film isn’t sophisticated but it is. There is a fine line between what is comedic and what is very real. I wanted to walk that fine line. It is very difficult to be funny. Apparently the old English actor Edmund Kean’s dying words were ‘dying is easy, comedy is hard’. Comedy is just that. It’s hard.” (deadline.com)
Screenwriter Richard Curtis on Casting
“The thing is, until the audition process, and until you find the right person, they remain so stubbornly bad words. This reminds me how dead on the page it was, until the right person came in.” They found Grant after seeing, by their estimate, 70 or more possible actors. The actor has been droll, in the years since, as to just how low he was in his career at the time. “I was always the Nazi brother,” he once said of his film work to date; when the Four Weddings audition came around, Grant had taken work teaching the French actor Juliette Binoche how to do an English accent. He was being paid cash in hand, “like the plumber”. Four Weddings, as he often tells it, was a last throw. Curtis recalls that the jokes in his script seemed to work, suddenly, when Grant came in to read. “When you audition for my films, nine out of ten times, it doesn’t work at all. There may be writers where the writing has a particular quality which means that it sounds pretty good with lots of actors, and you’re trying to find the best actor. Whereas I think with mine you’re looking for a tiny bit of realistic comic flair. And until you get that optimistic, humanistic performance it’s really no good at all.”Because of a sudden collapse in funding in the middle of 1992, Four Weddings’ developmental stage was unusually drawn out. Kenworthy says, “We auditioned for over a year. Not intentionally, but because we couldn’t get the film off the ground. The money wasn’t there, the interest wasn’t there. But we kept on meeting and talking through the winter of ’92, auditioning people…” When Working Title eventually found the funding, Kenworthy believes the emerging Four Weddings was in a stronger place.” (theguardian.com)
About Screenwriter Richard Curtis
Richard Curtis is a film writer and director, responsible for films such as “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill,” “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” “Mr Bean,” “Love Actually,” “The Boat That Rocked,” and most recently “Trash” and “About Time.” In the other half of Richard’s life, he is co-founder and vice-chair of Comic Relief, which he started after visiting Ethiopia during the 1985 famine and led to the fundraising event, Red Nose Day. He has co-produced the 14 live nights for the BBC, and since 1985, the charity has made over £1.25 Billion for projects in the UK and internationally. In 2015, he helped bring Red Nose Day to the United States with the partnership of NBC and Walgreens – where it has so far raised nearly $150 million to help children in the USA and around the world. Richard was a founding member of Make Poverty History, the campaign for the MDGs and worked both on that and on Live 8 in 2005. As part of his contribution to the MPH campaign he wrote “The Girl In The Cafe” for HBO and the BBC – a television drama based around the G8 summit – which won 3 Emmys. In 2015 he helped found Project Everyone to work to make the Global Goals famous and effective – and is now a UN Advocate for the SDGs. (project-everyone.org)
About Director Mike Newell
“Michael Newell was born on March 28, 1942 in St. Albans. While reading English at Cambridge he began directing student theatrical productions. After graduating in 1963 he joined Granada as a trainee director, moving from news and documentaries via serials to plays. In 1968 he turned to freelance production, collaborating with playwrights such as David Hare, John Osborne and Jack Rosenthal. Although his television film “The Man in the Iron Mask” (UK/US, 1977) received a limited theatrical release, Newell’s move away from television was gradual. In 1980 he directed “The Awakening,” a horror film based on Bram Stoker’s “The Jewel of the Seven Stars,” backed by EMI and Orion. It was followed by the grim New Zealand-set “Bad Blood,” made for the independent company TVS, and five films – “Dance with a Stranger” (1985), “The Good Father” (1987), “Soursweet” (1988), “Into the West” (Ireland/UK/US, 1992) and “Four Weddings and a Funeral” (1994) partly financed by Channel 4… In 1991 Newell directed “Enchanted April” for BBC television (1992), but released theatrically in the USA, where its whimsical Englishness proved highly popular. “Four Weddings and a Funeral” was even more of a success, breaking box-office records in Britain after its warm reception in America and going on to reap huge financial rewards internationally…His next film was the sourly realist “An Awfully Big Adventure” (Ireland/UK/France/US, 1995)… He then seized the opportunity to make a big-budget American film, but his chosen subject, “Donnie Brasco” (US, 1997)…Newell returned to comedy with “Pushing Tin” (US, 1999), starring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton as rival air traffic controllers in New York; but “Mona Lisa Smile” (US, 2003), starring Julia Roberts as radical art teacher in a conservative American girls college once again returned him to women in the 1950s. He acted as executive producer on BBC Films’ “I Capture the Castle” (Tim Fywell, 2003)… (screenonline.org.uk) Newell’s other films include, “Love in the Time of Cholera” (2007), “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” (2010), “Great Expectations” (2012), “The Interestings” (2015), and “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” (2018).