If you're an Altman fan and haven't yet watched one of his films while wearing headphones, you gotta try it. I watched A Wedding (1978) on my laptop while hanging out at San Francisco's Cafe Neon last night, and immediately realized how much more of that nuanced, Altman-brand dialogue I was going to catch as a result of having the soundtrack piped directly into my head.
A Wedding starts off—surprise—with a wedding ceremony. There's another, less happy event that occurs at the outset too, but I'll keep that one secret so you can Netflix this gem in peace.
One of the many great things about A Wedding is that around 40 minutes in, it gets incredibly funny. Carol Burnett contributes to this of course, and despite only having a single line, Mia Farrow is deeply funny too, but it's mostly just that Altman somehow manages to work the film up to a particular pitch at which point everything becomes completely hysterical. Prior to filming it, Altman commented to Roger Ebert that he thought it might end up being his funniest film, and he was right.
This second, intensely comic half of A Wedding is all payoff. It's ushered in by a painfully saccharine rendition of "Love is a Many-Splendored Thing"—a song that I suspect Altman hated—as sung by a warbly soprano for the couples' first dance. This ditty was originally composed for the 1955 movie of the same name, after which it became a runaway hit and won an Oscar for best song. A Wedding, it serves as the backdrop for a bunch of scandalous little plot turns that Altman reveals gradually over the course of its performance. He lets the song play out in real time so it seems punishingly long which heightens the sense of absurdity. By the end, love definitely seems a lot less splendored. It's brilliant.
"Did you choose this song?" the groom asks the braces-wearing bride, who replies that she didn't, but that she thought Jennifer Jones had nice teeth in the film.
Throughout A Wedding, characters make various references to how different love and romance are post-sexual revolution America and Altman ironically uses the ancient rite of a wedding to highlight just how much had changed. The 1955 film Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing featured adultery and a mixed-race relationship, but with predictably dire consequences tacked on at the end. The interracial relationship in A Wedding, by contrast, is portrayed as the least deviant one in the film, and the gay characters too (one a bridesmaid and one a groomsman) are shining beacons of normality and level-headedness amidst the other frantic wedding guests, each of whom is unraveling in their own highly overmedicated way. In addition to his spot-on observations about the unchecked substance abuse of the 70's, Altman also brings a more timeless human frailty into the mix and gets the proportions just right.
It's all very funny in that sophisticated, character-driven style that Altman perfected. How he managed to be so unsentimental yet affectionate toward his characters at the same time, I'll never know. As a filmmaker, he somehow pulls off being both a naturalist and a stylist too—a seemingly impossible balance—but such is the nature of genius. Shuffle this one into your queue as soon as possible and remember the headphones.
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