Considering how hermetically sealed it is in the airlessness of its own comic conceit, it’s a wonder that You’re Cordially Invited still pours out like flat champagne. Nevertheless, the new wedding trifle from writer-director Nicholas Stoller and starring Reese Witherspoon and Will Ferrell is sweet, pink and plentiful, spooned out this week by Amazon Prime Video. While I was one of the few people on Earth who had the opportunity to catch it at my local theater, the rest of the world will have to settle for eloping with it on the couch.
YOU’RE CORDIALLY INVITED ★★ (2/4 stars)
Directed by: Nicholas Stoller
Written by: Nicholas Stoller
Starring: Will Ferrell, Reese Witherspoon, Geraldine Viswanathan, Meredith Hagner, Jimmy Tatro, Keyla Monterroso Mejia, Jack Mcbrayer, Celia Weston
Running time: 109 mins.
Stoller, a graduate of the Apatow school who has recently plied his varied talents as the director and co-writer of Billy Eichner’s R-rated Bros (2022) and as the writer of the PG Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019) brings a sturdy, audience-friendly slickness to most everything he does. But before Your Cordially Invited, Stoller—who authored some truly inspired moments of chaotic profundity in the last two Muppet movies and 2017’s Captain Underpants—had applied his workmanlike aptitude mainly to making actual films. Now it seems both he and his two esteemed stars—all of whom are also listed as producers—are in the business of delivering products.
Ferrell’s Jim is the kind of “girl dad” for whom the hashtag was coined, a widower who greets his newly engaged daughter Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan, hilarious in Blockers, underutilized here) with a secret handshake and three different kinds of fresh baked cookies. He’s also a whiz with the curling iron and baked the comically oversized wedding cake (read: destined to topple over) for Jenni’s upcoming nuptials.
His opposite number, Witherspoon’s Margot, is a “hard-charging reality TV producer” (these sort of characters were once magazine journalists or worked in TV news). Margot is hell-bent on delivering a dream destination wedding to her younger sister Neve (Meredith Hagner, the murderous gold digger on the Apple+ show Bad Monkey) at the Palmetto Inn, seemingly the only structure on the small island where the sisters spent their summers with their dearly-departed grandmother.
That the two weddings in which the leads are unduly invested are accidentally booked for the same June weekend is not just the film’s single source of comedy, it is also its only interest.
Rarely has a movie been so profoundly incurious about its own world, whether it be the setting (it was shot on Georgia’s Lake Oconee, not that we get to see much of it) or its characters. Jenni, for example, appears to have a grandmother who we see during the ceremony, but is otherwise never glimpsed or mentioned.
The enterprise snaps to life only sporadically, primarily when its well-chosen character actors manage to steal moments of vitality away from the profound indifference that surrounds them.
The legendary Celia Weston, who I remember as Jolene on Alice and who has been brightening the corners of features for five decades (including 2005’s Junebug and 2023’s A Little Prayer) finds a prickly comic pathos within Witherspoon’s disapproving mother. Theater Camp’s Jimmy Tatro is quietly hilarious as Neve’s betrothed, a morally righteous Chippendales dancer.
Both Witherspoon and Ferrell have their moments too. She does well with that inescapable wedding comedy trope, the drunken toast, and Ferrell can really milk an angry glance. But both are doing watered down variations on characters they created in actual movies, like Election and Old School. (Stoller goes so far as to recycle the latter’s tranquilizer bit when Ferrell learns of his daughter’s engagement and his world begins to slow down.)
So, is this what movies are now? The entities that make them seem content to simply take something familiar and process it in a way that is vaguely pleasing, utterly unchallenging, and easy to spread—kind of like Velveeta. They go down easy enough, but they only leave you craving the real thing.
