A Wedding is a 1978 American comedy-drama film directed by Robert Altman, about a high-society wedding between the daughter of a Nouveau Riche family from Kentucky and a young man from an Old Money family in suburban Chicago.
While the wedding itself goes off without a hitch, all kinds of drama and hijinks occur at the reception. For example, the bride's sister (Mia Farrow) announces that she's pregnant, while the groom's grandmother (Lillian Gish) abruptly dies—which her doctor tries to cover up, to avoid spoiling the festivities.
Dennis Christopher and Paul Dooley appear in the film as the bride's brother and father, a year before playing a different father and son in Breaking Away. Also in the large Ensemble Cast are Carol Burnett (as the bride's mother), Pam Dawber (as the groom's equestrian ex-girlfriend), and Geraldine Chaplin (as the wedding planner), among others.
Got a Screen-to-Stage Adaptation in the form of a 2004 comic opera.
Tropes:
- Adaptation Distillation: Dozens of characters and subplots get cut out of the opera version to make time for the songs. Mac is combined with Dr. Meecham, Snooks is combined with his brother-in-law the minister, and Reedley is combined with Wilson.
- Addled Addict: Regina has been addicted to heroin for almost twenty years and has clammy hands, a nervous and distant disposition, and a habit of getting lost in nostalgic tangents.
- Aerith and Bob: The three Brenner kids are named Hughie, Muffin, and Buffy.
- The Alcoholic: Dr. Meecham demands a drink when he first arrives at the wedding and is drinking in several of his later scenes.
- Ambiguously Absent Parent: An ambiguously orphaned version. Dino's third cousin Victoria (the bridesmaid who Ruby finally gets a joint from) and her grandmother both attend the wedding, but her parents are never seen or mentioned.
- Bait-and-Switch: Muffin's parents and twin brother are horrified when they see the car that she and Dino apparently left the wedding reception in get into a fiery crash. Fortunately, the car was stolen and the two of them are fine.
- Big Fancy House: The Corelli/Sloan family has a very large mansion with a replica of an Italian restaurant in the basement.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: Both sides of the wedding party are full of dysfunctional or quirky individuals, although not all of them are defined by those quirks and some of them seem normal.
- The groom was previously sent to military school for delinquency and once had a fling with his new fiancée's sister. The groom's dying grandmother Nettie Sloan has shades of an Evil Matriarch despite some Pet the Dog moments. One of her daughters is a sometimes superficial executive whose husband has fallen out of love with her, another is in love with their African-American butler and resents Nettie for forbidding the match, and the third daughter is a heroin addict. Her other son-in-law is an Italian former busboy who Nettie snobbishly forbids from talking about his past, with his secrecy making many people mistake him for a mobster. His brother shows up at the wedding without an invitation and has a raging libido. Nettie's sister is a socialist and has no sense of tact or grace. Nettie's granddaughter and grandniece seem well-adjusted, but they do smoke marijuana in one scene.
- The bride still has Pubescent Braces and her sister seems to dislike her. Said sister is an Elective Mute who Really Gets Around and has an odd grasp of reality. Her interactions with their Hot-Blooded father hint at unconsummated Parental Incest. Their brother initially seems like a drug addict, but actually has epilepsy. Their mother feels tempted to cheat on her husband with one of her new son-in-law's uncles. One of their aunts is a Serial Spouse and her daughter is preoccupied with marijuana. Their uncle and other aunt are a devoutly religious couple who sometimes annoy people and have lots of kids, the eldest of whom mistakes an obvious sex joke about the Manly Gay Reedley looking at mens’ flies for a reference to the film The Fly (1958).
- Bilingual Bonus: Luigi, the father of the groom, and his brother occasionally speak in un-subtitled Italian.
- Bottle Episode: Aside from the opening scene (a church wedding) and a short scene on the highway, the entire two-hour movie takes place in the (admittedly large) Corelli mansion and the surrounding grounds.
- Bouquet Toss: When Muffin tosses the bouquet, her new husband's ex-girlfriend Tracy catches it. Tracy angrily tosses it away, and it ends up in the hands of the equally uninterested wedding photographer.
- Convulsive Seizures: Muffin's brother Hughie needs to take pills for his epilepsy. Unlike most examples of the trope, though, the one time he has an attack, he shakes a bit and snot comes from his nose, but he doesn't fall to the ground or anything. note
- Cool Shades:
- The stern chief of security at the Sloan mansion wears dark glasses.
- Cocky bad boy Briggs is wearing sunglasses when he arrives at the reception on a motorcycle.
- Dirty Communists: Aunt Beatrice is an outspoken communist who makes Stay in the Kitchen comments to a female security guard and insults a lot of South-American refugee workers who work for Toni due to how they fled the draft rather than serve a communist regime. Toni also notes that for all her talk about how people should be workers, she is living off her family's fortune.
- Dysfunctional Family: On both sides of the aisle.
- Evil Matriarch: Nettie Sloan employs a doctor who supplies one of her daughters with heroin, forces said daughter's husband to hide the fact that he used to be a waiter and never see his family, and forbids one of her other daughters and her African-American lover from spending time together in public.
- Exact Words: Dr. Meecham tells Toni that he's checking her mother's temperature. When Toni asks how it is, he replies that it's low, but that's fine "under the circumstances." Mrs. Sloan is dead, so, "under the circumstances," it is indeed nothing to worry about.
- Extremely Short Timespan: The film covers less than a day, despite loads of characters having character arcs and the movie running at over two hours.
- Foreshadowing:
- The first lines of dialogue have the camera crew debating whether Regina is glassy-eyed or has a "beautiful glaze" in her eyes. It later turns out that the glass-eyes comment was more accurate, as Regina is a drug addict.
- After seeing the replica restaurant in the basement, Snooks asks if Luigi owned a restaurant back in Italy, and he vaguely replies "something like that." Later scenes reveal Luigi is a former waiter whose mother-in-law forbids him from discussing his past profession.
- Former Teen Rebel: Muffin's uncle is a polite teetotaler, minister, and father of nine. He freely admits that his youth was full of drinking, troublemaking and womanizing.
- Four Lines, All Waiting: There are a lot of plots with varying degrees of importance and little intersection throughout the movie. Nettie's staff try to hide her death from the wedding party, Mac tries to convince Tulip to have an affair with him, Luigi struggles with his unhappiness about how tightly Nettie controls his life, Jim and Aunt Marge flirt, Buffy announces that Dino has impregnated her, Ruby tries to see if anyone else has marijuana, Clarice tries to convince Randolph the butler to get married now that her mother is dead, and much more.
- The Friend Nobody Likes: It's implied that Briggs and Tracy are only invited to the wedding and the reception due to being the bride and groom's respective exes and Briggs being Dino's roommate. They miss the wedding itself and arrive late with excuses that may or may not be true. When Briggs dies after stealing Dino's car and it's speculated that Tracy was with him, most of their peers are unconcerned and resume partying. Granted, they did just think that Muffin and Dino died and are overcome with relief to find them alive, but Luigi is the only one to show any concern over how two people are still dead and someone should notify their families about what happened.
- The Fundamentalist:
- Downplayed with Reverend David Rutledge and his wife Clarice, who are generally friendly, well-meaning and unobtrusive but sometimes annoy or unsettle people while discussing their beliefs. David believes that God talked to him and told him to abandon his life as a Former Teen Rebel about eighteen years earlier, and views dancing and drinking as sinful. His wife Clarice frustrates Tulip by talking about how much marriage vows mean and how Good Girls Avoid Abortion when it seems as if Dino has impregnated Buffy.
- The cook is very angry and scandalized that her son and his girlfriend spent the night in a room together, until she learns they had a spontaneous private wedding shortly after arriving back in town.
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Zigzagged. When it turns out that Buffy is pregnant, most of her family besides Reverend Rutledge and his wife want her to have an abortion. However, Dr. Meecham says that she's too far along in the pregnancy for an abortion to be safe. Additionally, the need for an abortion becomes less urgent when it turns out that Dino the groom probably isn't the baby's father after all. Buffy's mental disorder makes it unclear what she thinks of the whole thing.
- Hidden Depths: Ruby seems like a dim stoner for most of the film, but she is perceptive enough to notice that Mack and Tulip keep leaving the party together (although she fails to grasp the significance of this) and is a good harp player.
- Honorary Aunt: Briggs calls his former school roommate's mother "Aunt Regina."
- Jerkass: Muffin's father Snooks is implied to lust after his younger daughter Buffy, but then considers her Defiled Forever after she sleeps with several boys from the Military School. He is also extremely rude to his wife, is racist toward the butler, and shows some Skewed Priorities by bringing up how much he paid for the wedding when everyone thinks Muffin and Dino are dead.
- The Mafia: Luigi, the father of the groom, is rumored to be a mobster, which is one reason why almost no guests attend the reception. Actually, Luigi is a former busboy who met his wife while waiting on her. His wealthy mother-in-law allowed them to get married, but forbids him from seeing any of his Italian relatives or from telling people about his real former occupation, with his secrecy making people assume he's a gangster.
- Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Buffy claims that she's pregnant and Dino is the father, but it turns out that she slept with almost everyone at the Military School, so Dino probably isn't the father.
- Manly Gay: Reedley is an athletic and serious Military School instructor and is gay.
- Married to the Job: Jeff, the security chief, drunkenly admits that he has a self-imposed vow of celibacy to avoid distracting himself from his job.
- Massive Numbered Siblings: Muffin's uncle and his wife have nine kids.
- Military School: Muffin met Dino while he was attending the military school next to her house. Her mother is disconcerted to belatedly find out that Dino was at the school because he got kicked out of his old school. Several members of the wedding party are cadets from the school.
- Monkey Morality Pose: Used in the poster shown above.
- Must Have Nicotine: Janet, Nettie Sloan's nurse, constantly needs cigarettes, especially when she's dealing with the stress of her patient dying.
- Nervous Wreck: The wedding planner is quite neurotic and has to deal with miserable occurrences like barely any guests showing up, the groom's aunt presenting a nude portrait of the bride (drawn from her yearbook photo), and a storm hitting the house.
- No Name Given: The various musicians at the wedding and eight of the nine Rutledge children are all unnamed, even though they have several scenes apiece and all of the other non-extras are named.
- Not What It Looks Like: Muffin walks in on her hew husband Dino and his gay groomsman Reedley in the shower, seemingly having oral sex. Actually, Dino is passed out drunk and Reedley is trying to use the shower to wake him up, but Dino fell down and slumped against his crotch.
- One-Steve Limit: Averted. Dino Corelli is named after his paternal uncle, who shows up at the wedding unexpectedly.
- Pet the Dog: Dr. Meachum is a handsy, hard-drinking heroin peddler who has little patience for people who disagree with him and tacitly acknowledges that he's less moral than the average doctor, but he can be considerate toward others. He doesn't want Nettie's death to ruin her grandson's wedding. He isn't opposed to performing abortions but won't do it when it would endanger the mother's life. He also reminds Luigi that Nettie is dead and can't control his life anymore to defuse a fight between Luigi and his brother after Nettie forbid Luigi's brother from visiting.
- Potty Emergency: Once the wedding party arrives at the Big Fancy House for the reception, most of the characters immediately start racing around to try and find the bathrooms.
- Really Gets Around: Buffy is revealed to have slept with at least twenty-six boys from the military school, and has a liaison with Luigi's brother, who she just met, in the final scene.
- Pubescent Braces: Muffin, the bride, is in her late teens, still has braces, and is one of the more unassertive and innocent characters.
- Repetitive Name: William Williamson and Jake Jacobs.
- Scatter Brained Senior: The bishop who marries Dino and Muffin is twenty-five years older than the groom's grandmother, an old friend of his. He has to read cue cards during the ceremony and can't remember whether it's the bride or the groom who's related to his old friend. He can't even remember how many years he's been semi-retired for.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The film ends with Luigi driving away from the wedding ceremony and the others, maybe just briefly and maybe for good, after reflecting on how Nettie can't control him anymore and most of the people there don't know the real him.
- Secret Relationship: The cook's son and his girlfriend have recently gotten married (to the cook's delight), but kept it a secret to avoid upstaging the wedding couple.
- Serial Spouse: Muffin's aunt Marge has been married and divorced four times, and spends most of the movie striking up a relationship with the Sloan family's gardener.
- The Stoner: One of the bridesmaids, Muffin's cousin Ruby, spends a lot of her screen time trying to find out if anyone else at the wedding has any marijuana to share with her.
- Tuckerization: Corelli was the maiden name of Robert Altman's first wife, while Nettie was named for his paternal grandmother Annette "Nettie" Bolt Altman.
- Uncertain Doom: At the end of the movie, Briggs steals Dino's car and dies when it crashes into an oil tanker. It is speculated that Tracy left and died with him due to her own absence, but it's also possible that she is fine and left separately or is merely somewhere else in the large mansion.
- Upper-Class Equestrian: The wealthy Dino's ex-girlfriend Tracy arrives at the wedding on horseback, wearing a nice riding outfit.
- Vanity License Plate: Dino has his name on his license plate.
- Wedding/Death Juxtaposition: The hijinks at the high society wedding reception include the groom's grandmother Nettie dying and everyone trying to hide it to avoid spoiling the festivities, and the bride's bitter ex-boyfriend dying in a car crash after stealing the honeymoon car.
- White Gal on Black Guy Drama: One of Dino's aunts is in love with her mother's African-American butler. As soon as her mother (who forbade their relationship) dies, she wants to marry him, but he displays concern about the backlash from her society peers.
