It has become somehow fashionable lately to make all-star comedy-dramas centered around events (New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day) and now that trend has usurped a wedding.  The Big Wedding, to be exact.  Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Amanda Seyfried, Topher Grace, Katherine Heigl and Robin Williams are the headliners, although Ben Barnes and Ana Ayora are just as prominent and David Rasche and Christine Ebersole play punchline characters.  When it isn’t offensive, due to unnecessary profanity and crudity, the film is actually rather funny — and it plays even better as a drama.

This confection is concocted by writer – director Justin Zackham, who also wrote the flawed comedy-drama The Bucket List several years ago.  Zackham stages the upcoming wedding of De Niro and Keaton’s adopted son (Barnes) as an excuse for the dysfunctional family members to air dirty laundry to each other, everyone at the wedding and, of course, the audience.  Zackham can’t take sole credit for the script; it is based upon a Swiss / French film known as My Brother is Getting Married (2006). Zackham has completely overhauled the concept, with more emphasis on humor and less on irony.

The movie might actually be good if it didn’t focus so heavily on sex and its various consequences.  Every character is having sex acts, or sex urges, or sex hangups, and most of them are eventually exposed during the weekend of the wedding.  Some of this is actually cute, or funny, or both, but it just becomes so tiresome that the characters are overwhelmed by it.  That is unfortunate, because the dramatic elements which underlie the laughs are surprisingly effective.  When the film plays as a drama it is pretty solid, but then it backslides into crudity again and again.

Forty years ago, this could have been a genial Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda comedy with some upcoming stars to flesh out the cast.  It wouldn’t be as farcical, but would tug at the heartstrings and leave viewers with warm feelings.  Even a movie experience as vanilla as that would be preferable to the smarmy sexual shenanigans given the spotlight here.  Zackham seems to be a pretty decent director of actors, but he needs to work on the maturity of his scripts.  ☆ ☆.  8 May 2013.