Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon’s New Rom-Com Is Destined to Be This Year’s Anyone But You
You’re Cordially Invited seems sure to be a streaming hit. I’m not sure it should be.
The Amazon Prime Video rom-com You’re Cordially Invited is written and directed by Nicholas Stoller, who made some of the more memorable comedies of the 2000s and 2010s, including Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the Neighbors movies. His new film is a would-be throwback to that era in other ways as well. It co-stars two of the biggest box-office draws of the aughts, Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon, albeit each in a role neither of them would have taken on at that time: Ferrell because his shambling every-oaf persona lent itself better to broad buddy comedies than to warmhearted romances, and Witherspoon because, 20 years ago, she would have been cast as the high-maintenance bride herself, rather than that character’s micromanaging older sister. The idea of bringing together these two titans of Hollywood likability—veterans, in Ferrell’s case literally, of the old-school studio comedy—had promise. Emphasis on the “had.”
Ferrell’s Jim is a single-dad widower who’s been raising his only child, Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan of Blockers and 2020’s Bad Education), since she was 6 years old. Their father-daughter connection is so close as to become a running joke, with the pair immediately short-circuiting any hint of potential conflict with a demonstration of cooing affection. When Jenni announces she’s marrying her boyfriend (Stony Blyden), Jim represses his fears of abandonment by springing into superdad mode, immediately booking them a wedding weekend at the Palmetto House, a tiny hotel on an island in the state of Georgia where he and his late wife married years ago. The trouble is that unbeknownst to Jim, the elderly innkeeper who answers his phone call drops dead before she can find a working pen to write his name down—a pitch-dark sight gag of the sort this often treacly comedy could have used more of.
Witherspoon’s Margot is a trickier piece of work, a tightly wound reality-TV producer in L.A. who’s semi-estranged from her Atlanta-based family because of a prickly relationship with her judgmental mother (Celia Weston). Still, Margot adores her younger sister Neve (Meredith Hagner of Search Party and Bad Monkey), so when she learns Neve is both engaged to a dimwitted but adoring Chippendales dancer (American Vandal’s Jimmy Tatro) and secretly pregnant with his child, Margot is determined to go all in on planning the perfect wedding for her baby sis. Guess which remote island resort she chooses to reserve for the blessed event? That’s right, the Palmetto House, where both families converge on the first weekend in June for what each party believes will be a private family gathering.
After some negotiation with the inn’s anxious manager (an underutilized Jack McBrayer), the two clans agree to share the limited space by staggering their planned events so as not to overlap. The shenanigans that unfold over the next few double-booked days should be predictable to anyone who’s seen a romantic comedy set at a wedding. At some point, an elaborately tiered cake will crash to the ground. A collapsing dock will dunk dressed-to-the-nines attendees in water. A pair of guests will perform a sappy pop song (here, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s country-inflected duet “Islands in the Stream”) that gets reprised by the whole cast under the closing credits, just as happened last year with Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” in the unpleasant yet successful rom-com Anyone But You. And while everyone may not end up with exactly the partner they thought they were fated for, family rifts will be healed, long-suppressed hurts will be tearfully confessed, and, at least in this one case, live alligators will be wrestled in hotel-room beds, for reasons that are never entirely clear to either the characters or the audience.
The best moments in You’re Cordially Invited come in its middle section, when Jim and Margot have dug into their battle positions and sworn to one-up each other both as event organizers and as the emotional caretakers of their respective brides. Even when they’re working from a less than sparkling script, Ferrell and Witherspoon’s enormous reserves of movie-star charisma, and their shared flair for playing characters who are as comically self-absorbed as they are sure of their own moral righteousness, make their bouts of dance-floor sparring and top-this wedding toasts genuinely funny. Stoller understands, too, that no wedding comedy could work without a supporting cast of endearingly terrible relatives, so he gives Margot an extended family that includes Leanne Morgan as a perpetually drunk and horny sister, Rory Scovel as a knuckle-dragging brother, and best of all, Celia Weston, stealing every scene she’s in as a hypercritical Southern matriarch whose barbed exterior conceals unexpected maternal warmth.
Nadira Goffe Finally, an Honest-to-Goodness Great New Studio Comedy
Selena Gomez Cried in an Emotional Video. Now Liberals and Conservatives Are Attacking Her. Why Do These TV Shows Keep Using the Same Dirty Trick? Neko Case Wrote a Haunting Memoir. She Had to Survive the Unimaginable. She’s Published 23 Bestselling Thrillers. Every Single One of Them Is Exactly the Same.Sadly, You’re Cordially Invited eventually founders on the same rocky shores as many recent attempts to revive the rom-com. In its final act, as the interweaving strands of nuptial chaos begin to resolve into a détente among the newlyweds and their families, Jim and Margot somewhat abruptly emerge as romantic partners themselves. While the age distance between the two is not enormous—Ferrell is 57 to Witherspoon’s 48—there is a curious wrongness to these two as a couple, especially given their characters as previously established in the movie. Jim, we have been shown in scene after scene, is an over-enmeshed father who badly needs some time on his own to figure out who he is. Margot, for her part, is a happily busy career woman who has never evinced any sign of dissatisfaction with her single status. Pairing them up at the end as lovebirds mutually crooning the very same song that was earlier used as an example of Jim and his daughter’s quasi-incestuously codependent relationship leaves the viewer with a claustrophobic sense that coupledom is the only conceivable happy ending.
What if Jim and Margot had ended up as close but bickering friends, continuing to one-up each other via text about their respective brides’ ongoing blissfulness? Or what if they had slept together in a moment of Champagne-fueled folly, only to realize the next morning that though they might not be a viable long-term match, at least they would always have that night at the Palmetto House? For the romantic comedy to continue to evolve as a genre, an outcome every film fan seems to want, we need more viable paths to happy-ever-afterness than the Shakespearean model of marrying off every character in the last scene. If You’re Cordially Invited merits your RSVP—and for die-hard fans of the genre, it might—it’s because of the comic chemistry between its dueling event planners. But does every bickering couple in a wedding rom-com need to end up as the figures on top of the cake?
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