Mark Reviews Movies: THE WEDDING GUEST

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 28, 2019

It all begins with the appropriate level and tone of mystery. Here is a man, arriving in Pakistan and going to great lengths in order to cover his tracks. Even before leaving, he packs his suitcase with multiple passports, and on the two separate occasions when he rents a car in cities many miles apart, he provides a different name and the accompanying identification to prove it.

The extended opening montage sequence of The Wedding Guest is a tantalizing first piece of a puzzle. Who is this man? Where is he going? What are his intentions? It helps immensely that the man is played by Dev Patel, cast rather ingeniously against type by writer/director Michael Winterbottom. We think we have an idea of this character, if only because of the type of roles that Patel usually plays and the movie's quite innocuous title. His character's every action during the lengthy opening, though, suggests something quite the opposite. The beard, the tough stare, the stone face that barely breaks into a polite smile when talking to people, and the harshly determined attitude of Patel's appearance here fill in the rest of the enigma.

What we do learn of Patel's Jay, a name that might just be an initial for his real one or a fake one for all we know, ends about here. To be sure, we learn of the character's plan and why he's doing it, but he remains a troubling, seemingly contradictory mystery. That might be fine. After all, there's nothing inherently wrong or unsatisfying about a character whose back story never comes or whose behavior seems at odds with his attitude and his other actions. There are some characters in the movies and in life from whom we want to keep some distance, if only because we sense that figuring them out might only lead to disappointment. An unknown danger can much more intriguing and appealing than a known quantity of explanatory details.

The movie's central problem, though, is that Winterbottom doesn't wholly trust the mystery and danger of this character. By the end of the movie, Jay will have kidnapped a woman and killed two people—both in "self-defense," although it's clear that neither one is justified on a legal or even moral level. Jay will feel just guilty enough about the first murder that we see him staring with regret at his victim's photo in an online news article. We—it must be assumed—are meant to think a little better of Jay because of this most minimal reaction to his crime.

He also—and here's where the movie really tests the limits of this character as an enigmatic threat—will have fallen in love with the woman he abducted—not a kind of warped infatuation, either, but a sincerely felt sort of love. For her part, Samira (Radhika Apte), the kidnapped woman, seems to fall for Jay, as well—not that brand of desperate attachment that comes with Stockholm syndrome, as we might anticipate, but an actual feeling of bonding with this man, if the movie's final moments are to be believed.

In terms of the narrative, we're supposed to believe those final moments, in which the shared love is confirmed despite the circumstances, by the way. As one might expect, though, it's almost impossible to believe this development on a rational or emotional level. It's even more difficult to believe that Winterbottom thought this path for this story was a good idea.

There isn't much in terms of a plot, since most of it has Jay—and then Jay with Samira in forced tow—travelling around Pakistan and India, trying to stay off the radar. He was hired to abduct the woman by Deepesh (Jim Sarbh), her lover, after Samira's family arranged her marriage to someone else. Deepesh's plan is to meet with Samira in India, where the two will run away together, living off diamonds he stole from his family business. He gets cold feet, leaving Jay in the awkward position of trying to return a frustrated Samira, who refuses to leave until she can see Deepesh, back to Pakistan.

The makings of a character-based thriller—or at least one in which the assorted, conflicting motives and goals of these characters are set against each other—are here, but once it becomes obvious that something more will develop between Jay and Samira (While lying in a shared hotel bed, each gives secret, longing looks to the other when the other isn't looking), an alarm in the mind starts blaring. The real question isn't how these characters will resolve their desires—for love, for freedom, for money. It's whether or not Winterbottom is actually going to go forward with what seems patently absurd.

To be fair, the romance between Jay Samira in The Wedding Guest isn't as straightforward as we might fear it could be. The idea, though, remains a head-scratcher, especially in the final scenes. The movie stands as a prime example that filmmakers have difficulty grasping a pretty basic notion: Just because a story features a man and a woman, that doesn't mean they have to fall in love.

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