When three sisters go to their mother’s wedding, conflict and dysfunction eclipse the happy occasion. This drama nods at the love of family and declares that we should look to the future, not the past. But it’s a disjointed slog filled with foul language, drinking and visually explicit sexual content.
There’s going to be a wedding.
It’s the third wedding for Diana. Her first two husbands happened to be good friends, both pilots, both lost in the same war. All these years later, Diana has found love again. But her three daughters aren’t necessarily all that joyful about the coming nuptials.
Katherine, for instance, is a British Navy captain, soon to be promoted to her first major appointment: captaining an aircraft carrier. In fact, Katherine went into the service out of love and admiration for her beloved hero dad, Diana’s first husband. And for Diana to “settle” now for Geoff—a frumpy, graying teacher type—well, it just rubs Katherine wrong.
Victoria is the next eldest daughter, and she was born of heroic hubby number one as well. She’s not so put out over Geoff being a step down, but she’s not very pleased with how it might change her narrative. Victoria, you see, is quite a famous Hollywood actress. And she regularly tells talk-show audiences about the hardships her family had to endure, alone and penniless. Weaving in Geoff will be a bother.
Sister number three, born of husband number two, is a nurse. And nurse Georgina doesn’t care so much about the whole Mom-marrying-some-guy thing, really. She’s much more devastated over her own marriage. Her husband, Jeremy, is a serial philanderer. She’s known about it for some time. (Though she doesn’t know that even Victoria slept with him at one point in the past.) Anyway, she’s finally had enough. And at Victoria’s prodding, Georgina hired a detective who’s wired their home with cameras. She’s horrified at what she might see while she’s away.
Oh, but the sisters are only the tip of the collective dysfunctional iceberg here. There’s a lesbian lover and an adopted son in the mix who’re about to show up. And a handsome local love interest who might stir up some not-quite-cooled embers from the past. An über-wealthy Frenchman is flying in to claim a beautiful bride of his own. And there are so many intermingled grandchildren that it’s hard to keep track of who belongs to whom.
They’re all pouring in for a wedding. And all focused on, well, everything but.
Then there’s Geoff. He’s a nice guy who loves a woman named Diana.
Did you hear that they’re having a wedding?
The three sisters all have emotional problems, issues with commitment and lives riddled with affairs and infidelities. That isn’t anything positive, of course. But in contrast, their mother, Diana, has a very level head on her shoulders. She struggled through many difficulties with no husband and the responsibility of raising three young daughters alone.
However, Diana tells her girls about her earnest love for Geoff. And she faces off with her daughters’ collective angst about her taking a new name and, in a sense, letting go of the husbands and fathers from her past. She points out that she loved those men; but she then suggests to her daughters that they should move on from their adoration of them. “They weren’t the perfect men you’re fantasizing about,” she notes. Diana in turn challenges the women to grow up themselves. “Let go of the children you were, and pay attention to the children you have.” She also tells them to take notice of what they value and the things they do with their lives. “Our entire lives are about choices.”
For his part, Geoff is a kind and caring man. He tells the sisters not to worry about their mom, saying, “Loving her, protecting her is my job now.”
Katherine comes to grips with the fact that she has put her career above all else and not taken time for her adopted son. She does what she can to adjust that choice.
We see a quick wedding ceremony in a small local church. As the party leaves the church, the camera catches sight of a cross in a nearby cemetery.
After a bachelor’s party, an inebriated Geoff mistakenly walks into Victoria’s bedroom. She sits up and we see her naked from the waist up. The camera shifts position to the side and keeps looking on as the scene continues. When her sisters complain that she’s not covering up, Victoria notes, “People pay good money to see this.”
A detective shows Georgina a video of her husband running partially naked about their house with another woman. The sexual encounter that ensues mostly avoids nudity (except for a bare backside), but what is strongly suggested is still extreme in terms of the behavior it implies without directly showing. That scene also involves a sex toy that the camera does repeatedly picture.
Victoria wears an extremely low-cut dress. One of the sisters is a lesbian. And though we see her avoiding a call from a “Jack,” whom the film implies is a former male lover, we find out that the caller is a current female lover and co-parent of her son. Someone says, “Bloody lesbians. They fight for the right to get hitched up. They never do it.” Jack eventually reveals that she’s pregnant through donated sperm. Two women kiss.
Diana slaps Victoria for disrespecting Geoff. The sisters get into a nasty fight, verbally and physically pushing one another. Then Georgina pushes Katherine and Victoria to the ground, and Katherine subsequently tumbles into a nearby stream.
We hear that Katherine and Victoria’s pilot father was shot down during the war. Georgina’s father went missing in the same war and was never found.
There are a dozen f-words and a handful of s-words in the dialogue, along with multiple uses of “a–hole,” “h—,” “d–n,” and uses of the British crudities “bloody,” “b-gger off,” “b-llocks” and “w-nker.”
In addition, God’s and Jesus’ names are misused a total of four times.
The sisters and their mom drink wine at dinner. And wedding guests all consume wine and champagne at the wedding reception. Georgina also drinks quite a bit throughout the weekend because of her nervousness about seeing a video of her husband cheating. A wealthy man helicopters in and hands Victoria a three-foot-tall bottle of wine.
Georgina and Victoria both smoke cigarettes at various times. And Diana takes a puff of a CBD cigarette offered by a friend, and she gags at the taste.
Victoria speaks with her therapist on the phone, and other family members listen in as she loudly accuses them of emotionally abusing her.
My Mother’s Wedding has a handful of nice messages tucked into its cinematic bridal bouquet. The principle one is an encouragement to love your family members and to move toward the future with them, rather than be obsessed with the loss, grief and perceived slights of the past.
However, getting to that sound bit of advice is a slog.
The film’s worldview is morally loose, for starters. The sisters’ interactions are all painfully self-absorbed; their character is generally underbaked. Then we can add in the story’s gratuitous sex and nudity. And the dialogue is peppered with a continuous scattershot of profanity.
The conclusion then flounders around with a husband’s twisted sexual infidelity and one sister’s struggle with lesbian motherhood rather than delivering a satisfying close (despite plenty of first-rate acting talent on display here).
In the end, even wedding-movie lovers will likely be hesitant to RSVP for these nuptials.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
