Mark Reviews Movies: SISTER OF THE GROOM

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 17, 2020

Alicia Silverstone's performance almost carries Sister of the Groom beyond the movie's shortcomings and past the main character's more questionable actions. It's always fascinating to watch an actor who was a big star come into his or her own later down the line. Silverstone has been working with consistency since her big break a couple decades ago, making an impression in smaller roles that have gone against her earlier screen presence and persona. Her work here, in a leading role of some depth, shows that there's a lot more potential in her than we might have gathered from the 1990s and for her in the future.

She plays Audrey, a woman on the verge of turning 40 who has, without her even realizing it, arrived at a crossroads in her life. She's married to Ethan (Tom Everett Scott), a more decent and funnier man than we might expect from the vague details of his job in the financial sector, and the couple has at least two unseen children. They seem happy and comfortable together, but appearances can be deceiving.

The impetus for Audrey's sudden and dramatic re-evaluation of her life arrives with the forthcoming wedding of her brother Liam (Jake Hoffman), who has fallen in love with a pretty French singer named Clemence (Mathilde Ollivier). The two made an abrupt change of their wedding date, in order for it to align with a Jewish holiday celebrating soulmates. The inconvenience is only the first of many reasons that Audrey suspects this union might not be a good fit for her younger brother.

Writer/director Amy Miller Gross begins this story as a comedy of errors, with complications as small as Ethan accidentally spilling coffee on Audrey's dress on the drive to the wedding location and as significant as Audrey getting into a continual, passive-aggressive grudge match with her future sister-in-law. That feud, which progressively escalates as the weekend of the wedding proceeds, is the comedic conceit of Gross' story—a simple hook that leads to a further examination of why Audrey is so discontent with her life as it stands right now.

The pieces of Audrey's past and present fall into place gradually, although Gross expects us to fill in perhaps too many gaps and make some less-than-clear connections. We learn that her and Liam's mother died two years ago. We learn that the mother held no small amount of control over Audrey's decisions about the course of her life and career. She was going to be a successful and famous architect, but something happened—something that led to her returning home from the big city, ending up with Ethan, and putting her career on hold in order to raise her children.

Audrey wants to go back into architecture. Liam runs a real estate company and has plans to give his sister some work. At the rehearsal dinner, Liam, with Clemence looking on with a bit of self-satisfaction, drops a couple bombs.

Audrey won't be renovating their family home, which Liam bought and where the wedding festivities are being held, as they had planned. In fact, Clemence has convinced Liam that his business shouldn't become a family affair, so all those projects that Audrey was looking forward to have been canceled. Worse, Liam and his soon-to-be bride have hired Audrey's ex-boyfriend Isaac (Charlie Bewley), a famous architect, to take over the jobs—including the complete destruction of the old family home, to be replaced with new buildings.

Most of the material in the first and seconds acts is pretty light, as Audrey becomes more frustrated with Clemence, starts to dissect all the ways that Liam's future wife tries to control him, is offended by just about everything she says, and takes advantage of every opportunity to do something that undermines or embarrasses her future sister-in-law. There's good reason for some of this. Clemence is controlling, keeping track of how much Liam is drinking and scolding him for playing basketball the day before the wedding. She's either naïve or trying to insult Audrey, such as when Clemence assumes Audrey is pregnant on account of her abdomen, which is extended from a hernia—a condition about which Audrey is incredibly insecure. How far, though, can and should Audrey take her little retaliation, before it goes from a relatively innocent dispute to something conniving, calculated, and cruel?

Audrey walks a fine line between victim and aggressor here, and Silverstone's performance both relies on and subverts her inherent charms. We have to like Audrey, as difficult as that sometimes becomes while she goes out of her way to sabotage her brother's wedding and even her own marriage. Silverstone ensures we do and, more importantly, helps us to understand the sense of pain and desperation that's driving Audrey's gradual fall toward some pretty petty actions.

The movie itself, though, isn't quite as convincing in that regard. We may learn everything we need to know about Audrey to comprehend why the character thinks and behaves in the ways she does. So much of the first half of the story is set on maintaining a comedic tone, though, that the third-act turn into witnessing Audrey's long, dark, and drug-fueled night of anguish feels sudden and forced. Sister of the Groom is torn between serving as a gimmicky comedy and an incisive character study, and those two elements never quite come together.

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