Love is All They Need?: JUMPING THE BROOM

Jumping the Broom is the kind of warm comic drama in which personalities can clash and long-held secrets can be exposed but all is ultimately forgiven for the sake of a wedding. In this case, the bride’s family is a wealthy family with a mansion on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard while the groom comes straight out of Brooklyn. They’re madly in love but – surprise, surprise – their families aren’t.

The bride (Paula Patton) and groom (Laz Alonso) recede into the background of their own story. There’s the typical last minute fighting and cold feet and declarations of love for the two of them to act out, but the movie is smart to find much reason to showcase the eccentric families. With a movie this comfortably predictable, it’s a pleasure to find that the ensemble is stuffed with enjoyable performers. They’re given far too little to do, but they fill out the gaps in the humor and pathos far better than you’d expect.

Angela Bassett and Loretta Devine are the dueling matriarchs presiding over all sorts of wedding related silliness while the wedding’s guests include the likes of Mike Epps (a reliable source of humor), DeRay Davis, Tasha Smith, Romeo, Megan Good, and Valarie Pettiford. All the while, the uptight wedding planner (Julie Bowen) finds herself in a perpetual state of cultural confusion. This is a mild farce with characters sent careening into each other in the typical fashion of both wedding movies and culture clash movies in which big social events are cause for people to find new love and, just maybe, new ways to think about others.

The movie is broad and drawn in quick strokes. It’s stretched thin, rambling across any number of themes (race, economics, religion, sexuality) without much depth given over to any one of them. I suppose it would be too much to ask for such a feather-light comedy to be a serious commentary on the state of modern America, and that’s not what I was expecting. But the nods towards deeper subjects in the screenplay by Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs serve to hobble a picture that’s otherwise blandly sweet and not exactly nuanced, making it feel like it’s playing it a bit safe.

There’s a simple likability to Jumping the Broom but neither the comedy nor the families’ dramas are pushed far enough. It's not altogether unagreeable, it’s just slightly less than good. The director, Salim Akil, is a veteran sitcom director and it shows. I don’t have anything against the form; I enjoy good sitcom work, but I wouldn’t want to watch one in a theater. Akil, drawing on that experience, capably directs the traffic involved with having such a large cast and he keeps the movie moving along with a nice, bright polish. I didn’t exactly have a good time but I didn’t have a bad one either, and by the time the credits rolled I found myself entirely unaffected by the experience.

The Hangover (2009)

The Hangover is the kind of effortlessly entertaining, explosively inappropriate, R-rated summer comedy that provides plenty of laughs and then leaves without a trace. There are no quotable lines or priceless moments that will last much past seeing the thing, but it’s plenty of fun in the moment. It doesn’t hurt that it has a fun premise. Three guys take their friend (Justin Bartha) to Vegas for his bachelor party only to wake up the next morning to find that they have no memory of the night before and have lost the groom.

It’s a great hook, sending the three guys through Vegas on a desperate search for their friend, along the way running in to all kinds of strange characters that reveal pieces of the puzzle of their night. It doesn’t hurt that the three guys are played by very funny actors embodying specific types of modern male dysfunction. There’s Bradley Cooper, handsome, fun-loving, and rebelling against middle-class married-life suburbia, a real Fight-Club type. There’s Ed Helms, a gangly, nerdy, cautious dentist, under the thumb of a suspicious, bossy girlfriend. Then there’s Zach Galifianakis, the loopiest, goofiest of the bunch. His face is hidden behind a Grizzly-Adams beard. His belly folds over his belt. His eyes are often hidden behind large sunglasses or a dazed glaze. He’s awkward and uncomfortable to watch but completely funny in the way he delivers the strangest lines (he has to be back in town for the Jonas Brothers concert and must stay 200 yards from all Chuck-E-Cheeses).

The three guys tear through town running into a baby, a tiger, a stripper, cops, doctors, gangsters and even Mike Tyson in their search for their friend and to find out what, exactly caused the mayhem they discover. Why is a mattress speared on a statue? How’d they get that car? Whose baby is that? Who ordered those custom mugs and hats? What’s that chicken doing? Dude, where's our car?

The movie has no weight – I never really cared about the characters – but there’s enough humor and hot air to float the movie to the finish line, even if it starts to deflate a bit in the third act. Even though I didn’t care about the people, they were still likeable creations, and there’s enough curiosity factor to each new development – how’ll they get out of this? – to sustain the freewheeling energy for most of the time. Director Todd Phillips has a fine cast (including support from Jeffery Tambor, Heather Graham, Rob Riggle, Mike Epps, and Ken Jeong) and uses them well. He also knows his way around the dude humor of the concept, building on his past experiences with Old School and the like. Phillips guides the movie with a steady, sure hand, knowing when to punch up the humor and knowing when to keep it low-key. This isn’t going to be an especially memorable picture – its effect is already wearing off and I’ll have mostly forgotten it within a year or two – but it’s sure to be a staple of late-night TV.