AFI Dallas Review: Cake: A Wedding Story

The comedy Cake: A Wedding Story struck me as a very appropriate film to screen at the AFI Dallas festival. Any movie where the mother of the bride agrees that a small wedding is best, but considers a small wedding to mean 450 people, and cannot conceive of any setting other than the country club, gives many of us Southern-raised married women a jolt of recognition, nightmare flashbacks or gratitude and relief that our moms were the exception and not the rule when it came to wedding planning. One of my notes when watching this movie was "I am so glad we did ours [wedding] on our own." If nothing else, Cake: A Wedding Story certainly provides a compelling argument for an elopement: provided both parties know about it ahead of time, that is.

In a sweet opening scene, Felix and Juliet are at a museum admiring Juliet's favorite photos of classic movie-star couples when Felix decides to propose. He has a wonderful plan of elopement that Juliet is starting to weaken toward agreeing upon ... until we hear the Jaws theme and Juliet's mom descends upon them, and we know that all is in vain. Cut to the wedding, which is enormous and elaborate, and Juliet's realization that this is not what she wanted at all. She kicks her mom out of the dressing room, writes Felix a note, and escapes from the mega-wedding madness, entrusting the note to Felix's stoner friend. (Why she didn't call Felix on his cell phone I do not know, but that would have made for a much shorter film.) No one wants to give Felix the "note of doom" even after he finds out that Juliet has run off; what no one realizes is that the note is Juliet asking Felix to meet her at a coffeeshop so they can run away and elope together.
Cake: A Wedding Story hangs on this one piece of mistaken communication, and it is a slight plot element on which to base the suspense of an entire feature film. At times, we wish someone would just figure out what's going on and end this comedy of errors. Fortunately, a fair amount of humor could be milked out of the reception that continues endlessly even though the wedding has been called off. The "groom's dance of loneliness" that replaces the traditional bride-and-groom dance is hilarious. In fact, there's a lot of weird dancing in this movie, although most of it is from Clarence, who's harbored a nearly lifetime-long crush on Juliet. Felix's French supermodel ex-girlfriend, his oft-married dad and born-again mom, a rabbi and Episcopal priest who are supposed to co-conduct the ceremony and Felix's career-military uncle all help add to the fun. The uncle grew annoying after awhile, and some of the other less complex characters wore out their welcome, but the subplot with Juliet's sister Liz and the best man Bret was endearing and helped keep the movie afloat.

The cast is a little large for a 90-minute comedy, with more than a dozen wedding guests to keep track of. I admit I often confused some of the characters, especially the younger men and women who looked interchangeable. I would have preferred it if the film focused on its standout characters instead of spending time with nearly every guest at the wedding. I also had trouble believing that people would stick around for so long during a reception for a wedding that never took place, especially the ditched groom. The movie didn't make much sense in relation to real life, but it's a situation comedy first and foremost, and the rules of reality are often ditched in this type of comedy in favor of further laugh-inducing complications.

My favorite character in the film was the one played by familiar character actor Burton Gilliam at the end of the movie. You would instantly recognize Gilliam as Harvey Korman's sidekick in Blazing Saddles. It could easily have been the kind of stunt casting that low-budget films do to try to gain more recognition, but Gilliam shines so brightly in those last few minutes, and yet gives the other actors a chance to shine too, that you can't help but smile. Even if we'd never heard of Gilliam, it would have been ideal casting. The opening and closing scenes are the best moments in Cake: A Wedding Story, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.