Mark Reviews Movies: THE PEOPLE WE HATE AT THE WEDDING

The People We Hate at the Wedding, Amazon Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 17, 2022

Here's an ensemble comedy about a dysfunctional family that misses the key components of its potential: its ensemble and that it's about a dysfunctional family. Director Claire Scanlon has put together a promising cast, for sure, but The People We Hate at the Wedding, based on Grant Ginder's novel, seems reluctant to let these actors and their characters form any kind of connection, even one as troublesome and tenuous as these bonds are.

Instead, the movie, written by the sisterly duo of Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin and Wendy Molyneux, gives each of the major players an individual plot with various, wacky complications to endure. None of those isolated episodes is particularly unique, engaging, or funny, although the benefit of having a strong cast is that these actors can do a lot of the work for the filmmakers. In this case, they're asked to do a bit too much or, in a couple of instances, not nearly enough.

The premise involves a mixed but estranged family. After moving to London in her post-school days, Donna (Allison Janney) married the charming, wealthy, and philandering Frenchman Henrique (Isaach De Bankolé). Before the marriage ended and Donna returned to her hometown of Indianapolis, the couple had a daughter, who lived with her father and visited her mother once a year. Donna re-married and had two kids from that relationship. Everyone was happy and closely knit, but as the years passed, distance and time and various life events meant that that family grew apart and divided into assorted sides.

Now, Donna is divorced via her first marriage and widowed by her second, and the children are adults. Alice (Kristen Bell) and Paul (Ben Platt), the kids from Donna's second marriage, have a close connection, despite living on opposite ends of the country. Paul refuses to talk to his mother, regardless of how many times she calls and texts him, and Alice is so busy with work and maintaining an affair with her married boss Jonathan (Jorma Taccone) to keep up with much of anything else.

The possibility of a reunion arrives with invitations to the wedding of Eloise (Cynthia Addai-Robsinson), Donna's first child from her first marriage, in London. As close as the half-siblings were in the past, they don't talk to each other at all now, because Alice and Paul kind of resent her wealthy lifestyle, while Alice is upset that Eloise didn't visit her at a time of personal crisis a year ago.

After a lot of hemming and hawing, Alice and Paul decide to go to the wedding, if only so that she can have a romantic getaway with Jonathan and Paul can do the same with his boyfriend Dominic (Karan Soni), who has been suggesting that their relationship should be an open one—an idea that Paul hates. All of this seems primed for a lot of tension and conflict, and while those qualities certainly exist here, they're more connected to those relationships subplots, as well as Donna re-connecting with Henrique, than to the specific kind of bitterness that exists within this family dynamic.

The one exception is the relationship between Alice and Eloise, who tries to get her half-sister involved in the pre-wedding festivities and to make up for the unintentional slight against Alice. Even that, though, falls into the trap of making a gag out this material, from a floating hot tub trip on the Themes to a climactic heart-to-heart that's undermined by the joke of some fast-food product placement.

Most of the story revolves around Alice's whirlwind romance with Dennis (Dustin Milligan), whom she meets on the flight and seems to keep as a boyfriend on reserve in case Jonathan doesn't show, and Paul trying to navigate Dominic's obvious attempts to have a three-way with Alcott (Julian Ovenden). With all of the various misunderstandings and intentional deceptions within these two subplots, both Donna, whose thread with her ex-husband really goes nowhere and has a predictable payoff, and Eloise, whose character is reduced to being mopey for the most part, are shoved into the background.

There's very little for Janney to do, beyond occasionally looking a bit foolish (Donna eats too many marijuana edibles before her flight, just to clarify how clichéd many of the jokes are), and while Addai-Robinson gives a sense of there being much more to Eloise, the character primarily comes across as a plot device. Meanwhile, Bell is charmingly arch as the sarcastically tough but insecure Alice, and Platt is generally amusing as Paul is placed in increasingly uncomfortable situations.

A lot of this is forced (Beyond the usual convolutions, the movie twice tries to get laughs out of awkwardly loud, public descriptions of sex, only for the same guy, who happens to be Eloise's co-worker, to be present for both incidents). That's especially true of how The People We Hate at the Wedding saves any kind of development of or growth for this family until the third act, when all of the gags and complications are out of the way. In theory, that dynamic is the core of this story, but the story has other, far less interesting things in mind.

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