FILM

Four Weddings and a Funeral

directed by Mike Newell

starring Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell

at Loews Harvard Square

In "Four Weddings and a Funeral," screenwriter Richard Curits works hard to add interesting twists and turns to the familiar boy-meets-girl scenario. To begin with, the boy only seems to run into the girl at weddings and funerals (an unabashed but not intolerable exploitation of life's most emption-filled occasions). Second, the boy is a die-hard English bachelor who embodies the adage, "Always a bridesmaid and never a bride."

Curtis and director Mike Newell (of "Enchanted April") concentrate so hard on getting the comic trappings of this story right (with frequent success) that they seem to lose track of the love story at hand. In the first half hour we witness the comedic havoc wrought upon the life of bachelor Charles (Hugh Grant) after he meets a beautiful American named Carrie (Andie MacDowell) at Wedding Number One. We find ourselves wondering why he is suddenly so smitten with a one-night stand.

Unfortunately, this question is never answered, as Andie MacDowell miserably fails to carry off the part of the havoc-wreaking femme fatale. MacDowell seems to have evolved little since her days as a L'Oreal-model-turned-actress. While she is as stunning as ever, she remains trapped in the mold of a silent, sullen object of beauty. Her sophisticated sadness worked well in movies where she was only meant to portray a beautiful object, ("The Legend of Greystoke," "St. Elmo's Fire," The Object of Beauty"). In "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" she won acclaim for her portrayal of an emotionally repressed Southern housewife, but "Four Weddings and a Funeral," a light comedy, is an altogether differnt movie which demands a different kind of performance.

We simply are not led to believe that Charles is so enchanted by a woman who looks at him with expressions that alternate between bored and blase. When Carrie arrives at Wedding Number Two childishly brandishing her wealthy, doddering fiance, Hamish, like a new toy, we wonder why Charles doesn't simply ignore her. Instead we see a frazzled Hugh Grant whimpering like a wounded puppy. While Newell gets some laughs out of rather predictable run-ins with Charles' exgirlfriends, this whole interlude of petty jealousies, social faux pas, and missed connections again skirts the question of just why Charles is so infatuated with an American woman whose sole calling in life seems to be traipsing around England looking good in big hats and picking up wealthy octogenerian boyfriends.

MacDowell's performance does not register the difference between being an object of beauty and an object of desire. While the beauty of an object certainly helps to make others desire it, it is usually not enough in itself. Sharon Stone is beautiful; however, it was the combination of her looks, unabashed sexuality,intelligence, and total irreverence that made fans and Michael Douglas so susceptible to Catherine Trammel's wicked charm in "Basic Instinct."

Screenwriter Curtis apparently sought to imbue Carrie with some Catherine Trammell-like sexual bravado. As if Carrie didn't already seem shallow enough, in what is inarguably one of the worst scenes of the movie, (to MacDowells' credit, Carrie is poorly written as well as poorly acted), she dispassionately ticks off a list of her thirty-three lovers since her sexual initiation as a young teen. Are we to believe that Charles, who calls himself "a git that has only slept with about nine girls" is oh-so smitten by Carrie's sexual prowess? This hardly seems likely since the sex scenes between these two generate ahout as much heat as a popsicle.

However, lest we concentrate too heavily on the asexuality of this film, it must be noted that femme fatales needn't be sexual superpowers. Great objects of male desire are invariably so much more than that. They are multi-dimensional, interesting women who flaunt their own indentities and resist being typified as silent, passive, objects of male interest. One thinks of Debra Winger as Joy, C.S. Lewis' love interest in "Shadowlands," or Meryl Streep as Karen von Blixen in "Out of Africa." The same principle holds true in light romance, from Meg Ryan's idiosyncratic and slightly neurotic Sally of "Harry Met Sally" to Katherine Hepburn's fiery and yet vulnerable Tracey Lord opposite Cary Grant in "The Philadelphia Story."

In a recent New York Times article, director Mike Newell compared Hugh Grant to Cary Grant' saying that he carried on in the same tradition of high comedy. However, as Sarah J. Schaffer recently wrote in Fifteen Minutes, it was the power of Cary Grant's female co-stars that gave him the opportunity to be debonair, dashing, and devastatingly witty. While Hugh Grant does his best to manipulate the high jinks and high verbiage of this movie, his performance does not come anywhere near the stature of those of Cary Grant because his Charles has no Hepburn like counterpart with whom to share repartee and amorous tension. Without these basic ingredients, all the spice and sprinkle in the world cannot prevent this film from falling oddly flat.

Although misguided, Curtis' efforts do not go entirely unrewarded as the subplots and supporting characters that he creates truly engage us in their hilarious struggles to find true love in an age when sexual disease, emotional isolationism, and the withering of chivalry threaten to turn the final screws in the coffin of great romance.

Particularly wonderful is the all-too-brief treatment of the love affair between Gareth (Simon Callow of "A Room with a View") and Matthew (John Hannah in his screen debut). Hannah's reading of W.H. Auden's great love poem, "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone" at Gareth's funeral is one of the most poignant moments ever captured on celluloid.

The mixture of acute agony and perfect adoration in Matthew's terse Glaswegian tones perfectly conveys the weight of his loss. In complete contrast to Charles' improbable absorption with Carrie, Matthew's grif at the loss of Gareth is utterly believable because all along we have seen Gareth and Matthew as complete individuals bonded by friendship and love. Unfortunately, this reviewer found herself thinking that this subplot deserved its own movie and wishing that she had gone to see that one instead.

If Newell and Curtis had developed carrie's role in the plot of this film as well as they did the film's subplots, perhaps we would have come away feeling that two kindred souls had found each other rather than wondering why a man who had been happy in his bachelorhood would eagerly relinquish it for a woman who seems little more than a lovely shell.