**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Nia Vardolas, John Corbett, Michael Constantine, Lainie Kazan, Louis Mandylor, and Joey Fatone
Directed by Joel Zwick & written by Nia Vardolas
2001 PG
Review by the F&SN Critic and His Damn Wife
The thing about “ethnic” comedies is how universal they always are. Every ethnic group thinks it has the best food, it’s the most religious, it’s the most quirky, and its parents are the most embarrassing. Norman Jewison’s “Moonstruck,” with its New York Italians living life like opera, set the bar in 1986. Now we have “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” a movie so light as to almost not be there. It’s unapologetically superficial; it touches lots of things but never digs, it has no plot twists, it has almost no conflict, and the resolution of its one squabble is pretty easy to predict. But it hits on food, religion, quirkiness, and embarrassing parents cheerfully and efficiently, with nice, smiling people and a few good laughs along the way, all set to vibrant Greek folksongs.
Toula (Nia Vardolas) is the daughter of fervent Greek immigrants. In an amusing series of flashbacks we see her growing up different from all the blonde girls, we see how loud, large, and obnoxious her family can be, and we see her father (Michael Constantine) embarrassing her with his nonstop “isn’t it great to be Greek” attitude. This is a guy who modeled his home in the suburbs on the Parthenon and, every morning, drilled his wee ones on why being Greek is so great. At thirty Vardolas is a bastion of frumpiness, serving coffee in the family restaurant and always being told by her father to get married. And that she looks old. In a moment of resolve she starts taking adult classes in computers. She pretties herself up—watch for the charming mirror scene involving contact lenses—gets a new job, and falls for a charming high school teacher. He’s played by John Corbett, best known as K-Bear’s Chris in the Morning from “Northern Exposure.”
The problem is, Corbett’s not Greek. As Vardolas sees it, her family’s incessant Greekiness, mostly on behalf of her father, has dogged her for most of her life. Not only is her father an embarrassing loudmouth but he and his family always taught her to marry a Greek boy and churn out Greek babies. Much of the movie’s humor comes from Vardolas—and later Vardolas and Corbett—trying to be reasonable in the face of her family’s exasperating expectations of her.
“My Big Fat Greek Wedding” follows a solid three-act structure. In the first act, Vardolas is ugly and hopeless, without will or ambition. In the second act she remakes her appearance—without anyone’s help, by the way—and conspires, with the help of her mother, to get her father to allow her to go to college. The last act follows the wedding, and how she learns that her heritage is important, while her parents learn that she should be allowed to determine her own life. There are plenty of obligatory but amusing encounters in which Corbett, and eventually his parents as well, are subjected to various rites of passage, in which Vardolas’ family acts bizarre and the WASPs are required to smile politely and hide their discomfort. (WASP is short for “white Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” which in moviespeak translates into “dry non-ethnic middle American white guy who can’t dance or shoot hoops.”) First encounters with in-laws was recently handled to almost unwatchable perfection in “Meet the Parents,” but these scenes in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” have a definite truth to them for all of us son-in-laws, a truth that crosses all borders and nationalities. It goes without saying that this movie would not be the same if white John Corbett were replaced by, I don’t know, a black guy or an Arab, but like a lot of movies there are parts of “MBFGW” that are suspect when examined closely. Corbett’s willingness to be baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church without conviction, just to please Vardolas’ family, falls in that same category.