So I want to write about a movie called Jenny’s Wedding.
I put it on the other night because Katherine Heigl liking girls. Bonus: Alexis Biedel liking girls. Also, Grace Gummer as an annoying little sister! What could be horrible about that?
It turns out this thing has a 14 percent on Rotten Tomatoes! And it deserves every point! It is a horrible, horrible film! Yay!
So, here’s the plot: Jenny (Heigl) lives with Kitty (Biedel), and they aren’t just roommates! And everybody knows! Except her parents, her brother, and her annoying little sister (Gummer)!
What’s wrong with this movie? Let’s see.
Heigl and Biedel have the chemistry of a tumor! I don’t believe for a minute they’ve ever touched ass! I only believe Jenny likes girls when she says “I like girls.” I don’t believe she likes girls when she’s in the room with the girl she likes. Biedel doesn’t help as her best-formed character was Rory Gilmore, and you know how robust of a performance that was!
Heigl first came to most folks’ awareness as the affable but flawed Isobel Stevens in the famous Grey’s Anatomy, a gig she walked away from after five years. She may have been right to ghost that job in that what more can a character do after stealing a heart for a patient she’s in love with then building a clinic named for him with his dough? However, she was utterly wrong for leaving that job in that she’s had a really awful run ever since. I mean, I didn’t mind her run as Stephanie Plum, but I think that’s just me and her mother. Everyone else really hated it.
The sheer wasted talent in Jenny’s Wedding, though. Gummer is show-biz royalty, the daughter of friggin’ Meryl Streep, and she has really great hair. Tom Wilkinson is a huge British actor, plucked here to play the butt-hurt, stubborn old man father. Linda Emond, whose off-Broadway CV is as long as your left leg, sort of flails around in this as Jenny’s mom, who finally comes around with an oddly-played freak-out thanks to her nosey idiot neighbors. This is the sort of movie experience that makes you think, how in the world did these people agree to do this?
The best thing about this film is how it mangles montages. There are at least two montages, and they are boring. Montages cannot be boring. They are meant to swiftly move the story along. The montages in Jenny’s Wedding do not achieve this. They seem to be randomly patched together shots of our characters accompanied by horrible music.
The second montage includes footage of the annoying younger sister watering grass, an action that, through the logic of this film, presents her with an epiphanic breakthrough. I am not making this up. This character in this film is literally inspired to action by watching grass grow.
Now. Spoiler alert: Everyone comes around, even Dear Old Dad (who is, get this, a fireman), who refuses through most of the movie to be involved, suits up and shows up at the last minute to walk his little girl down the nave (it’s not an “aisle,” people; the “aisles” are on either side). So suddenly we are having a happy wedding and the congo line forms, and the camera pans far back, and the whole crowd parts to allow the newlyweds to dance, and I imagine that Biedel just felt as awkward as a left-handed bowler. End scene.
This is a bad movie. It’s so bad it’s fun to watch just so you can tell people how bad it is.
But it’s better than Birdman.