Rating: 2.5/4
In the romantic comedy “The Wedding Date,” starring Deborah Messing and Dermot Mulroney, the main character Cat (Deborah Messing) hires male escort Nick (Dermot Mulroney) to be her date to her half-sister Amy’s wedding, where Cat’s ex-fianc, Jeremy, will be the best man. Cat’s in a state of crisis; she wants to see her family at her sister’s wedding in England, but she can’t go without bringing along a stud of her own to convince Jeremy that she is over him, which she is not.
Enter Nick, the philosopher-escort that Cat reads about in an article in the New Yorker. One $6,000 down payment later and Cat is rendezvousing with her made to order man on the flight to England.
“The Wedding Date” disappoints visually; cinema is a visual medium, and the movie’s lack of interest in its surroundings is disappointing. The film is set in and around some of the most expensive and beautiful real estate in England in the deepest part of summer, and yet the elegance of the landscape and the deep colors of the season go largely unused.
The interior shots are only slightly better, cheating the viewer out of the opulence and visual metaphors that a romantic comedy begs for. That is, if this was a romantic comedy, because it’s not.
There is absolutely no romance or spark between Messing and Mulroney, despite Messing’s best efforts. Nick is played with a numbing monotone, dispensing pseudo-sage advice on love and truth with a sleep inducing deadpan that is just close enough to a bad Sylvester Stallone impersonation to be creepy. Nick is so flat that even in his epiphany of love for Cat he can barely muster a smile.
This is what is most laughable about this film: that somehow the alchemy of being both a comparative literature undergrad from Brown and a man-whore gives one a certain insight into the timeless truths of love and life and gives a man insight about the deepest yearnings of the 30 something upwardly mobile and lonely professional women. This dude is a hooker!
“The Wedding Date” stumbles by trying to teach viewers a lesson; Nick’s insistence that “a woman has exactly the love life she wants” is repeated several times in the film by Nick and others, and it falls flat. The movie loses its way by trying to deliver too many life affirming messages like stay true to yourself, never settle, you-can find the perfect guy, stop worrying what your family thinks, etc.
“The Wedding Date” should have stuck with being a comedy about a heart broken girl who takes a male escort to her sister’s wedding where hilarity ensues, not a message of hope for the broken hearted.