World wide weddings

Because June is the traditional “let’s get married” month, I’ve been watching a bunch of wedding movies to see which ones you might enjoy.

I rejected Runaway Bride (silly attempt to recapture the Julia Roberts/Richard Gere Pretty Woman success), My Best Friend’s Wedding (Julia Roberts again, but in a strangely churlish role), and The Wedding Planner (dippy plot and Matthew McConaughey, as the leading man, doesn’t do it for me). So skip those.

You’ve probably seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), a movie that uses a formulaic script with such flair and has such a great cast that no one cares. Nia Vardalos (who also wrote the script) is terrific as the ugly-duckling-turned-swan Toula Portokalos and John Corbett (of HBO’s Sex and the City fame) shines as her raised-in-a-country club lover, Ian Miller.

Greek Wedding is interesting because, for those of us who are not Greek-American, it provides a peek into a different culture. Some other wedding pictures do this even better.

Picture Bride (1994), directed by Kayo Hatta, was one of her student film projects at UCLA. The story, written by Hatta and her sister, begins with these words:

“At the beginning of the 20th Century photography undermined the tradition of arranged marriages in Asia. In place of face-to-face meetings, families and matchmakers used photographs to introduce prospective couples living in different parts of the country or even across the oceans.”

At this time, Japanese, Okinawan, and Korean men left their economically depressed countries for agricultural jobs in Hawaii. Through letters and photographs the men chose women from back home, paid their ship tickets, and married them. Between 1907 and 1924, at least 20,000 “picture brides” migrated to Hawaii.

The Hatta sisters’ grandmothers both went to Hawaii from Japan. Although they were not picture brides, the movie’s story is based on their experiences.

Riyo (Youki Kudoh), an orphaned 16-year-old girl, arrives in 1918 dressed primly in Western clothes. Her husband-to-be turns out to be 43, no longer young as in his picture. He works in the sugar cane fields. She, too, is expected to work in the fields.

The film’s lush photography, Hawaii’s sensual beauty, the writers’ humor and sensitivity soften the story of Riyo’s horror, hard work, and adjustment to her husband and new life. Picture Bride won the Audience Award at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival.

The great contemporary filmmaker Ang Lee directed another Asian-American film, The Wedding Banquet (Chinese title Hsi yen). Lee, from Taiwan, is best known for his Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), his seventh film.

The Wedding Banquet (1993), Lee’s second film, is about a successful Chinese-American businessman, Wai-tung (Winston Chao), who, with his homosexual partner, Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), fakes a heterosexual marriage for the sake of his parents, who want grandchildren. The parents travel to New York from Taiwan for Wai-tung’s marriage to Wei-wei (May Chin), an artist who is one of his tenants. The parents insist on a huge, traditional Chinese wedding banquet to celebrate.

As in Greek Wedding, viewers laugh as they learn about Chinese traditions but, more like Picture Bride, they also come to understand the core of Banquet’s characters. I especially liked Wai-tung’s father, played expressively by Sihung Lung.

Muriel’s Wedding (1994) takes us to Australia and a marriage between a small-town Australian woman from Porpoise Spit and an international sports hero from South Africa. The story, however, is not really about the wedding. It’s about Muriel (Toni Collette), a forlorn, floppy girl labeled “useless” by her father. Muriel steals money from her family and ends up in Sydney with an old school chum, Rhonda (Rachel Griffiths, who plays the disturbed Brenda in HBO’s Six Feet Under).

Muriel’s Wedding satirizes Australian culture while it sympathizes with Muriel. It’s both funny and grim. The wedding scene is wonderful.

But the best wedding scene of all time is in a plain old American film, although its 1960s setting may seem like a different culture today.

Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967), one of the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Films, is a satirical portrait of spoiled-rich-kid, recent-college-graduate Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) who doesn’t have a clue about what to do and probably doesn’t even know there’s a war on.

You have to wait until the end of the movie for the wedding but, trust me, it’s worth it. And on the way, you get to belly laugh at Ben and sing along with Simon and Garfunkel’s monumental soundtrack.

I first saw The Graduate with some high school students who, from that day on, never failed to sing “Hey, hey, hey Mrs. Robinson” whenever they saw me.