Taglines: It’s never too late to start acting like a family.
The Big Wedding is an American comedy film written and directed by Justin Zackham. It is an American remake of the original 2006 Swiss / French film Mon frère se marie (My Brother is Getting Married), written by Jean-Stéphane Bron and Karine Sudan. The film stars a large ensemble cast including Robert De Niro, Katherine Heigl, Diane Keaton, Amanda Seyfried, Topher Grace, Ben Barnes, Susan Sarandon, and Robin Williams. It was released on April 26, 2013 by Lionsgate in the United States and Canada.
With an all-star cast led by Robert DeNiro, Katherine Heigl, Diane Keaton, Amanda Seyfried, Topher Grace, with Susan Sarandon and Robin Williams, The Big Wedding is an uproarious romantic comedy about a charmingly modern family trying to survive a weekend wedding celebration that has the potential to become a full blown family fiasco.
To the amusement of their adult children and friends, long divorced couple Don and Ellie Griffin (De Niro and Keaton) are once again forced to play the happy couple for the sake of their adopted son’s wedding after his ultra conservative biological mother unexpectedly decides to fly halfway across the world to attend. With all of the wedding guests looking on, the Griffins are hilariously forced to confront their past, present and future – and hopefully avoid killing each other in the process.
The Griffins Request the Honor of Your Presence (2013)
This Spring, when an all-star, multi-generational cast led by Robert De Niro, Katherine Heigl, Diane Keaton, Amanda Seyfried, Topher Grace, Ben Barnes, Susan Sarandon and Robin Williams gathers together for The Big Wedding, you can bet a hilarious family fiasco is about to ensue. That’s exactly what happens in this uproarious romantic comedy about the ties that bind, as long-divorced couple Don and Ellie Griffin are forced to pretend they are still happily married at their son’s wedding. Among all their family and friends, the hoax snowballs, culminating in a series of surprising outcomes on the way to “I do.”
It all begins as the sprawling Griffin clan prepares for the nuptials of their adopted son Alejandro (Barnes). But what should be an occasion of pure bliss soon turns into sheer lunacy as the bride and groom try to make everyone happy — including Alejandro’s highly traditional, Colombian birth mother who has never been to America… nor been told that Don and Ellie are no longer married.
Now to get her blessing, Don and Ellie will have to act out their long-forgotten roles as a contented couple, while Don’s girlfriend Bebe (Sarandon) watches their performance in dismay. As the wedding weekend gets under way, love is in the air, but little white lies are tripping everyone up. In the mix, old flames will ignite, new romance will erupt, secrets will be outed and in-laws will be upended but, if they can all just avoid killing one another, the entire Griffin clan might just find themselves united in their own version of harmony.
The film’s cast of actors, accomplished in both comedy and drama, was drawn to a modern wedding story with a screwball twist: a family in the perilous, hilarious situation of pretending to be something they’re not, and discovering who they are in the process. Says Robert De Niro, who as Don Griffin finds himself in compromising positions in the midst of the celebration: “Every wedding has tension and stress. There’s always drama because everyone wants to plan everything perfectly, to get it right, to make everyone happy — but that’s especially true in this movie!”
Modern weddings seem to bring out the crazy in people like no other life event; perhaps in part because modern families bring with them to the big day so many amusingly complicated twists on love: from divorce to re-marriage to families that go well beyond the nuclear. This is the quirky contemporary reality that screenwriter-director Justin Zackham taps into with The Big Wedding, a story of some very knotted nuptials. . . and a family who will do the most outlandish things for one another’s happiness.
Zackham, who previously wrote the screenplay for Rob Reiner’s The Bucket List, set out to combine classic elements of screwball comedy — the barbed dialogue, the outrageous situations, the mix of sincerity and slapstick — with characters and family dilemmas that are strongly identifiable right now. But he never imagined that his script would bring him together with a star-studded cast mixing Oscar, Tony and Golden Globe winners with fresh-faced newcomers — all of them ready, much like their characters, to go to hilarious lengths for love.
It all started when Zackham saw the French-Swiss comedy Mon Frere Se Marie (My Brother Is Getting Married). The comic possibilities of the film’s concept — a long-divorced couple is asked by their adopted son to pretend to still be happily married for the sake of his biological mother — hit home instantly with Zackham. He loved the circular idea that the harder a divided family tries to keep up the appearance of blissful perfection, the more their conflicts start bubbling to the surface . . . and the more you get to really see what really holds them together underneath all the friction.
Zackham was already well acquainted with how weddings can push perfectly ordinary people to the edge. He recalls that his own wedding hit a snafu when his then-fiancee refused to elope because “it would upset her mother” and instead spent a year and a half in a mind-boggling planning frenzy. So he began re-imagining Mon Frere Se Marie as it might play out on his home turf in the fashionable suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut, where many Manhattanites escape from the city to raise their families. While bucolic on the outside, Zackham was well aware that Greenwich is filled with charmingly eccentric clans of all kinds.
“I grew up watching all these crazy but wonderful families interacting — and I saw them both falling apart and coming together and that was something I always wanted to write about,” he says. “So with The Big Wedding, I saw a chance to do a comedy that is not only a lot of fun but also has some real emotional truth to it — real anger, real surprise and most of all real love between family members who are very different kinds of people. I like comedy that comes out of characters wanting something so badly that they put themselves in strange and unnatural positions. That’s what happens to the Griffin family when Don and Ellie have to pretend to be married — yet they do it because they truly love their son.”
That motivation was the key to Zackham’s screenplay. Because as outrageously dysfunctional and disjointed as the Griffins might be underneath their harmoniously married “act,” Zackham also saw the family as bound together at their roots. “When Robin Williams asks Diane Keaton ‘Which kind of love are you feeling right now?’ she says ‘All of them,'” he points out. “And that idea was as important to me as the humor — that there’s a real affection between these people and for this one weekend, they are going to find a way to be a family, whatever it takes. In the middle of it all, you see all the different kinds of love that are work in any modern family.”
When Zackham’s childhood friend and long-time producing partner Clay Pecorin read the screenplay, he was moved by the recognizable characters, but found a great deal of humor in it as well. “It’s a very funny script,” Pecorin says. “I’m married, and have been to several weddings, so I know how they can become train wrecks. Everybody gets freaked out. You’re putting together families who don’t know each other, who might not really like each other, but they all have to figure out how to be together, and all of that comes out in a hilarious way in this story.”
Producer Richard Salvatore had a similar reaction: “When I read the script, I laughed out loud on every page which is very rare. You’ve got three levels of comedy going on — with the marriage, the reunion of Don and Ellie and then Lyla’s story — and it’s all very funny and silly but also heartfelt and loving. I’d done other comedies but this really had so much heart, I felt we’d be able to put together a very strong cast.”
That proved to be very much the case when Diane Keaton came aboard early on, then brought Robert De Niro along, starting a kind of domino effect of casting coups. “Diane really liked the script and was amazing in helping us put the film together,” recalls Pecorin. “Then Bob [De Niro] came on and suddenly everybody wanted to work with them and be a part of this project. We were pinching ourselves; we never expected to be this fortunate.”
Continues Salvatore: “We all felt Bob would be the perfect Don to hook up with Diane and that opened the floodgates. Then Katherine Heigl said she would be interested in working with Bob and she met Justin and the love fest started to grow.”
That love fest, Salvatore notes, was sustained by Zackham throughout the production. “The tone on the set starts at the top and if you have a director who cares about his actors, then the actors care more about the movie. Justin was always able to convey his passion for the project and every person on the movie brought their A game.” Once on the set, Zackham could have been intimidated by a cast this diverse and accomplished, but he says the opposite was true: their talent set him at ease. “Everyone from Bob, Diane and Susan to Katie, Amanda, Ben and Ana were so prepared and feeding off each other, that I realized the most important part of my job was just not to screw that energy up,” the screenwriter-director muses. “I’ve never had so much fun in my life.”
The Big Wedding (2013)
Directed by: Justin Zackham
Starring: Amanda Seyfried, Robert De Niro, Katherine Heigl, Robin Williams, Ben Barnes, Christine Ebersole, Patricia Rae, Megan Ketch, Christa Campbell
Screenplay by: Justin Zackham
Production Design by: Andrew Jackness
Cinematography by: Jonathan Brown
Film Editing by: Jon Corn
Costume Design by: Aude Bronson-Howard
Set Decoration by: David Schlesinger
Music by: Nathan Barr
Studio: Lionsgate Films
Release Date: April 26, 2013
Visits: 42
