Movie review: Still big, fat, and Greek

By Jay Stone

An older woman asked me the other day if I could recommend a movie for her. Nothing violent or angry, she said. Something funny and nice.

The only thing I could come up with — now that Brooklyn is gone from the theatres — was My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, which is pretty much My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but older. The original film, about a rowdy but lovable Greek family and their busybody idea of love, was the surprise hit of 2002 (to the tune of $240-million, a rom-com record). The new one has the same cast, the same setting, and the same feeling of being force-fed baklava by an insistently manipulative aunt.

That is to say, it’s not very good, but it’s sweet, and judging from the laughter and applause of a preview audience this week, it’s going to be a big hit among older women looking for something funny and nice.

It stars Nia Vardalos, the Winnipeg-born actress who also wrote the screenplay and created this world of eccentric fathers, nosy cousins and raucous brothers who gather around a family restaurant in Chicago. She plays Toula Portokalos, the slightly harried everywoman who in the first film married handsome Ian Miller (John Corbett) despite the fact that he wasn’t Greek and was a vegetarian to boot.

In the new movie, they have a 17-year-old daughter, Paris (the appealing Elena Kampouris), a sullen girl who is undergoing a similar harassment from her extended family (“we see no difference between hugging and suffocation,” Toula acknowledges) who all live on the same Chicago street and feature Greek flag designs on their garage doors, mailboxes, and porticos. The licence plate on their car reads “Opa!” They’re Greek-proud in what is meant to be a familiar way to any immigrant group: one of the secrets of this Big Fat franchise is the way Vardalos can parlay cultural stereotypes into recognizable and easy gags.

There are several dramas going on in the movie: some of the romance has gone from Toula and Ian’s relationship, Paris can’t wait to get out of town and away from her interfering family, and Toula’s parents Gus (Michael Constantine) and Maria (Lainie Kazan) have discovered that because of a clerical error 50 years ago in Greece, they’re not actually married: the priest forgot to sign their wedding certificate. This means that the entire family must get together to arrange a new wedding, a complication that — like all the conflicts in the film — bends to a combination of persistence, caring and an all-encompassing Greek know-how. It’s best expressed by Andrea Martin’s Aunt Voula, still blabbing away about her sex life and dispensing quasi-wise advice about love (“Remember you were a girlfriend before you were a wife.”)

Directed by Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine) with a workmanlike devotion to the familiar — not to say cozy — rhythms of romantic (or situation) comedy, MBFGW2 glides blissfully over any uncomfortable realities. That’s another reason for its appeal: it presents a happy fantasy in which ardor can be reignited when people simply decide to make time for one another, or a lifelong feud between brothers can be solved when they share a couple of drinks. When a character comes out as gay, the news is welcomed with a wise tolerance that the characters don’t show in any other circumstance.

It’s sure-fire stuff, in other words, and Vardalos has recycled some of the successful material from the first movie: Gus is still convinced that Greek is at the root of every innovation and word in the modern world (“Greeks invented hockey,” he says. “And Facebook.”) He still carries a bottle of Windex, which he regards as the cure for all medical problems. There are several scenes of women blooming into beauty by getting dressed in party finery and making entrances down the staircase, or across a restaurant, while the camera slowly moves up from their shoes to their décolletage so we can drink it all in.

It helps that Vardalos, who has an accessible attractiveness, looks better than ever, and Corbett doesn’t seem to have aged much either. It’s pretty suspicious, frankly, but My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 is such an essentially harmless project that it feels churlish to wonder about it too deeply. The entire film is like that: big and fat in the shamelessness of its emotions, Greek for convenience, and a wedding because who doesn’t like scenes of delicious food and happy dancing? It’s more of the same, which is both a recommendation and a warning.

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