"Wedding Crashers"

Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn whoop it up in this Hollywood comedy that's actually -- wowee! -- original and funny.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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July 15, 2005 | So many comedies today feel as if they've been made by tribunal, groups of elders who know what's best for us and who pretend to think they know what we'll find funny. But "Wedding Crashers" -- in which Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn play not-quite-grown-ups who dive-bomb their way into weddings to which they haven't been invited, chiefly to pick up women -- is that rare contemporary mainstream comedy that seems to have been made without parental supervision. The jokes sizzle and fly, with reckless disregard for propriety or for what the audience will "get." That's not to say the director, David Dobkin, or the writers, Steve Faber and Bob Fisher, are conspicuously trying to go over people's heads. But let's put it this way: I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I saw a touch-football sequence scored to the Dave Brubeck Quartet's "Blue Rondo A La Turk," a bit of music that used to be a staple in the homes of middlebrow American intellectuals, back when there actually used to be middlebrow American intellectuals.

The sequence might have just as easily used some pleasing blur of classic pop, just because that's what's usually done, and why mess with formula? But someone, somewhere, took the scenic, crooked road instead of the ho-hum thruway. "Wedding Crashers" isn't a perfect comedy: There's a great deal of trimmable flab in its last third or so, and the picture's redemptive ending smells vaguely of pressed luncheon meat. But for the most part, the movie has a loose-jointed, crazy-ass gracefulness. And even though it's conventional in the broad sense, it still vibrates with a sense of risk-taking.

Vaughn and Wilson play longtime best friends -- their names are Jeremy and John, respectively -- who are also partners in a Washington divorce-mediation firm. They're happily single, 30-ish guys who, during "wedding season," make lists of the nuptials they're going to crash, determining ahead of time what roles and pseudonyms they're going to adopt and following an elaborate system of rules. (They keep a couple of Purple Heart medals handy in case they're faced with a cash bar; who'd hesitate to stand a wounded vet a drink?) Their chief goal is to meet and sleep with as many women as possible. Dobkin gets the point across with an exhilarating montage showing Jeremy and John crashing multiple weddings of various ethnicities, but all of which, at one point or another, feature that perennial choice of wedding DJs, the Isley Brothers' "Shout!" And the sequence is cut in a rapid-fire spiral so we see John and Jeremy swinging their dates blissfully around the dance floor one second, and bouncing, with disreputable relish, into bed with them the next.

But John and Jeremy's meticulous routine is shaken when John is suddenly struck by the notion that what they're doing isn't quite right: "Do you think we're being a little -- sleazy? Well, maybe that's not the right word," he suggests tentatively to Jeremy, in a post-wedding-season bout of soul-searching. His doubts are intensified when, at Jeremy's urging, the two crash "the Kentucky Derby of weddings," hosted by the U.S. Treasury secretary (played, with muted mischievousness, by Christopher Walken), and John falls in love with one of the bridesmaids (played by the flirtatiously game Rachel McAdams).

The plot mechanics of "Wedding Crashers" aren't particularly important. What is significant is the way Dobkin and the screenwriters treat their characters. Only squares would want to see John and Jeremy undergo any sort of phony transformation (and, admittedly, the ending of "Wedding Crashers" flirts dangerously close to that). But while the movie revels in John and Jeremy's outlandish behavior, it also recognizes that they're rapidly nearing the age when it will no longer be considered cute.

More than once John mentions the fact that he and Jeremy are just enjoying themselves while they're young -- and there's always somebody nearby to remind them that they're not that young. The movie doesn't want to punish its characters for having a good time; it simply realizes that good comedy often has a bittersweet edge. Neither Vaughn, with his cranky prizefighter's jaw, nor Wilson, with his endless-summer smile, looks old by any stretch of the imagination. But now that you mention it, maybe there are a few little sun wrinkles around John's eyes, or a trace of genuine weariness in Jeremy's nervous, poker-face twinkle. John and Jeremy are the butt of the movie's jokes as well as its heroes. As much as we'd like to see them get away with these kinds of shenanigans forever, the movie is funny precisely because we know they can't.

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