THE STORY – A woman planning her sister’s ideal wedding and the father of a bride-to-be discover their destination weddings at a remote resort are double-booked. When both parties decide to share the small venue, chaos ensues and disaster awaits.
THE CAST – Will Ferrell, Reese Witherspoon, Geraldine Viswanathan, Meredith Hagner, Celia Weston, Keyla Monterroso Mejia, Leanne Morgan, Jimmy Tatro & Jack McBrayer
THE TEAM – Nicholas Stoller (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 97 Minutes
Anyone who has been to more than one wedding knows that they’re disastrous just as often as they are delightful. Between the alcohol, the long-held familial resentments, and the pressure hanging over seemingly everyone to send the happy couple off on a wave of love and happiness, there are simply too many things that could go wrong, which is probably why Hollywood loves making movies about them. Weddings capture humans at our worst and our best simultaneously, and there’s nothing Hollywood loves more than good people doing bad things and being forgiven.
This brings us to “You’re Cordially Invited,” the new romantic comedy from Nicholas Stoller, which takes place at a wedding…well, two, actually. You see, through a sitcom-y mix-up, Margot (Reese Witherspoon) and Jim (Will Ferrell) both show up at the Palmetto House, a sweet Southern wedding venue on a small island, for their weddings on the same day. Well, not their weddings, actually. Margot has been planning the wedding of her sister Neve (Meredith Hagner), the one of her three siblings she actually likes, where their beloved grandma used to live, while Jim booked the place he and his deceased wife got married for his daughter, Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan), to marry her boyfriend, Oliver (Stony Blyden). Desperate to give their beloved family members a beautiful day but also to prove something to themselves, they decide to split the venue and the weekend as equitably as they can. Naturally, chaos ensues.
Unnaturally, a romance between them also ensues, and this is the point at which you might reasonably complain about spoilers, given that the film has been sold as a comedy, not a romance. However, dear reader, that is very much the point. “You’re Cordially Invited” is a comedy (although your mileage may vary on just how much of one), with a romance tacked on for the stars in the last five minutes because Hollywood has never fully left the 1950s and its conservative, heteronormative view that the only appropriate ending for a movie involving a single man and a single woman of marrying age is for them to get together, whether or not it makes any logical sense or if the stars have appropriate chemistry. And in the unfortunate case of “You’re Cordially Invited,” it doesn’t, and they don’t.
Witherspoon and Ferrell are actually surprisingly well-matched for most of the movie. Ferrell, in full-on adorable girl-dad mode, remains a master of hilarious facial expressions, and Witherspoon’s tart tongue and spitfire attitude haven’t lost any of their edge. Their comedic skills fit together in the most entertaining way, managing to elicit genuine laughs out of some sub-par punchlines through sheer force of personality. Both are experts at playing tightly wound people coming undone, and watching their increasing desperation lead to worse and worse choices has its appeal. However, in the traditional Hollywood way, they must both be blamed for the terrible sin of caring too much about giving their loved ones a perfect day and unintentionally ruining it by doing so. This could lead to a lesson about appreciating what you have instead of striving for perfection or about how the sentiment behind one’s grand gestures is more important than the grandness of the gesture itself. But not here. No, here, it leads to them realizing that all this time they’ve been fighting with each other… because they were secretly into each other? And they need to get over being a single career gal/widower girl dad?
That’s a bit unfair, actually. Margot and Jim actually do learn a few things about themselves and how their perceptions of their own lives and those of their loved ones don’t line up with reality. However, these lessons are brushed aside like too-dry wedding cake in order to make way for a tone-deaf final few minutes in which the two people who have been sabotaging each others’ weddings for a whole weekend get pushed together on the basis that they haven’t really been obsessed with their respective weddings, but each other the whole time. This is patently ridiculous on its face, and Stoller actually seems to be in on it at first. However, after one big, bad joke, the film plays it straight, asserting that there’s a genuine connection between Margot and Jim that neither Witherspoon nor Ferrell have bothered to build. They’re both movie stars in roles uniquely suited to their strengths, so they give adequate enough performances, but in order for the film’s final few minutes to land, they need to have romantic chemistry, and they just don’t.
Outside of that central, glaring issue, “You’re Cordially Invited” is an average 2020s studio comedy, albeit one that feels more scripted and less improvised than most. This has its pluses and minuses since the film’s jokes aren’t just off-the-cuff funny lines but have actual solid joke construction underpinning them. Unfortunately, instead of being genuinely funny, they lean more towards awkward cringe comedy, gaining laughs from the pain of recognition and relief from not being in the room where it happened. That’s a legitimate source of comedy for a film set at a wedding, but given that the film wants its audience to laugh at how awful all these people are – each in different, character-appropriate ways – it’s whiplash-inducing that the film then wants us to smile and applaud as they all get the happiest of endings. Though, in a strange way, that actually makes “You’re Cordially Invited” a strangely appropriate movie to kick off 2025: Everyone is awful, the fact that Jenni is interracial doesn’t matter to the story or the characters beyond some aesthetic touches, and the nuclear family reigns supreme. It’s the kind of backward-thinking, myopic storytelling we were supposed to have moved beyond decades ago and a part of why romantic comedies fell out of fashion for a while. Watching “You’re Cordially Invited,” you can see why.
