Wedding Crashers

(2005) dir. David Dobkin
viewed: 01/11/06

I don’t usually watch comedies because they make me feel like I have no sense of humor. I think it’s a genre that must be incredibly hard to do because so many comedies and utterly unfunny. I can’t really even think of too many that I like whole-heartedly and have a hard time recalling the last one that really hit me somewhere near the funny bone.

Wedding Crashers isn’t awful in this regard. It has several genuinely funny bits to it and Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn carry the film pretty well with their respectively unusual charms. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either.

More disturbing than the amount of humor or the crassness of the humor, is the film’s rather extreme homophobia. The gay introvert son is portrayed as an utter sociopath without redeeming character. As he is the only gay character, the image of him stands out quite tellingly. The fact that the protagonists have an arguably homoerotic relationship and seem to be compensating big time for something in their rash of manipulative sexual conquests almost seems to support this fascist attitude toward homosexuality. As well, there is another moment when the grandmother starts spouting a diatribe about Eleanor Roosevelt being a “dyke” and this is played for laughs as well.

Though it sounds hardly subtle here and, honestly, subtlety is not an aspect of this film, one could easily analyze the proposed sexual mores and stereotypes in the film and what they are meant to represent. There is definitely a dark core to this film that feels much less intentional or conscious. And that may be it’s truly creepy aspect, looking at the way that these stereotypes and portrayals are accepted at face value by an audience more inclined not to consider the representations and simply to laugh along with the “heroes”.