YOU'RE CORDIALLY INVITED - Mark Reviews Movies

You're Cordially Invited, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 30, 2025

There's probably a funny movie—or episode of a TV sitcom—to be made from the premise of You're Cordially Invited. In it, two weddings are scheduled on the same date at the same exclusive, isolated, and relatively small venue. Neither party is ready or particularly willing to give up the place for logistical and sentimental reasons, so they have to figure out a way to share it.

The problem here might be—in part, at least—that sentimental factor. Writer/director Nicholas Stoller hints at some nastiness on the part of his lead characters, the two people who really, really want the weddings to happen at this venue—maybe even more than the brides and the grooms. Each one will occasionally try to sabotage the other's event, and in those instances, the movie is legitimately amusing.

Many take it for granted, but situational comedy requires conflict just as much as—if not, perhaps, more so than—drama. Without it, it's just a bunch of characters making jokes.

The conflict of Stoller's movie is right there in the setup. Jim (Will Ferrell), the father of a bride-to-be, and Margot (Reese Witherspoon), the older sister of a different soon-to-be bride, want the best for their respective loved ones, and each of them is getting in the way of the other's singular goal. Early on, however, Jim and Margot come to an agreement as to how to make both weddings happen at the same time at the cozy resort on a little island. While those characters eventually and occasionally break that arrangement for a variety of reasons, Stoller has essentially nullified the entire conflict of his story.

The rationale behind that, it seems, is that Stoller still wants us to like Jim and Margot. It's tough to like characters who can show casual and calculated cruelty, sure, but it's tougher to make a comedy about the actions of two self-involved people when the filmmaker prevents those characters from really being that way. Stoller has basically sacrificed his premise for some vague sense of goodwill and good-spirited fun. At its core, this conflict is petty and mean, but for whatever reason, it feels watered down here.

The foundations for the humor and characters are right there from the start. Jim is the single father to Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan) and has been for most of the young woman's life, following the unexpected death of his wife and her mother. The two have a co-dependent relationship, since Jim has put everything into making his daughter happy and Jenni is all-too keenly aware of that. When the daughter comes home from college and announces she's marrying Oliver (Stony Blyden), Jim is terrified of what it will mean for his relationship with Jenni, so he immediately books a wedding date at the place he and his wife were married, hoping to prove how important he still can be to the daughter.

Meanwhile, Margot is a producer of reality TV in Los Angeles, who's thrilled to learn that her younger sister Neve (Meredith Hagner) is marrying Dixon (Jimmy Tatro). Margot has a difficult relationship with the rest of her family, so she books the same island venue as Jim, because she and Neve have fond memories of spending summers there as children with their late, beloved grandmother. Because the owner of the place dies in between bookings, the new owner Leslie (Jack McBrayer) doesn't catch the scheduling error.

Despite how much these weddings mean to Jim and Margot, the rest of the movie is surprisingly subdued. After an initial confrontation, they do arrange to split the proceedings equally, which really does undermine the comedic potential, and from there, Stoller now has to invent a bunch of different reasons for Jim and Margot to get mad at each other and to scheme to ruin the other's happy day. The setup is contrived enough but contrived-enough for a silly comedy, but in order to keep these two protagonists likeable but still indulge in the promise of its setup, the screenplay becomes unnecessarily convoluted.

Some of the new reasons include a Jim and Jenni singing a song that's inappropriate for a father-daughter duet at the rehearsal dinner, Jim overhearing Margot speaking ill of his daughter, Jim's resulting effort to ruin Neve and Dixon's wedding ceremony, and Margot believing she spots one of the grooms with a woman who isn't his bride. It all becomes so messy for what is, on its face, a pretty simple comedic conceit, but that premise is unrecognizable by the time Jim ends up in bed with an unconscious alligator. Don't ask, by the way, because trying to explain it would be far too much effort for what the random joke is worth.

For what it is worth, though, Ferrell and Witherspoon are likeable, albeit too much so for the cutthroat joke that's ostensibly at the core of the story, and funny when You're Cordially Invited embraces how vindictively mean these characters can be. That's the joke the movie offers, only to miss the whole point of it.

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