The three primary collaborators of You’re Cordially Invited, who play the largest functional role in determining its prospects, have all made successful romantic comedies before, both creatively and financially. For writer-director Nicholas Stoller, it’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the Hawaiian-set 2008 charmer. Will Ferrell has Elf in his corner, both one of the best Christmas movies of all time and one of the best romantic comedies. Reese Witherspoon tends to have less of a signature success in this area, but you can choose from a half-dozen smaller hits that put her pluck and charisma to great use.
Throw them together, though, and they’ve just made one of the worst romantic comedies in recent memory. You’re Cordially Invited alternates between obnoxiously braying and sickeningly sweet. If it’s possible to send your regrets on this one before even pressing play on Amazon Prime, where the film is newly released, it may help preserve these collaborators’ previously unblemished records in your mind.
You’re Cordially Invited is part of the subset of romantic comedies we can think of as the “wedding disaster movie.” You know the ones. The bride and groom, whether they are central or side characters, will go through the ringer of physical pratfalls and other existential threats to their union as the big day approaches, with many of these occurring during the actual ceremony. In this case, there are two brides and grooms, because the central conceit is that the same inn on the same small Florida island, the Palmetto, has booked two weddings for the same weekend, when it has the capacity for only one.
This error occurred when the very old woman who tried to take the first reservation – who remembers the 57-year-old Ferrell’s character from when he and his own wife got married there – died just after starting to scribble it down, having only scratched an indentation into the page of their diary due to her pen being out of ink. Ferrell’s Jim, a widower for some 20 years now, is trying to reserve the spot for his own daughter Jenni’s marriage to her fiancée Oliver, whom he doesn’t like because he fears Oliver will take her away from him. (They’re played by Geraldine Viswanathan and Stony Blydon.)
Because the reservation did not, in fact, get taken, the woman’s successor at the inn, Leslie (Jack McBrayer), is able to use a pen that works to book the weekend for a competing party. (Why, in present day, none of this is being done by computers is unbelievable, even for a place that prides itself on quaintness.) That bride and groom are Neve (Meredith Hagner) and Dixon (Jimmy Tatro), with Neve’s sister, Margot (Witherspoon), doing the booking. Needless to say, none of this is figured out before the wedding date actually arrives, leaving the two wedding parties to either share the facilities, or kill each other in the process of not sharing.
The problems with Stoller’s script are many, but let’s start with the flaws of the other two collaborators, which tie in with that script. Neither Ferrell nor Witherspoon has figured out who their characters are, leading to wildly inconsistent portrayals with no centre. One version of Ferrell’s brand is the sort of bullying competitiveness on display in his interactions with Christina Applegate in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and there’s little doubt that’s what he’s trying to duplicate with Witherspoon, arguing through gritted teeth, their faces inches from one another. The thing is, Ron Burgundy came by his moments of lesser grace through sheer bluster and buffoonishness, unable to know himself well enough to know better. Jim, on the other hand, seems like he’s a premeditated a-hole, which makes it very difficult to like him – even when he switches, at the drop of a hat, to the aforementioned sickeningly sweet mode.
Witherspoon’s flaws are not as evident, but they result in just as little ability to know or like her Margot. Her conflict is that she has moved away from the slightly backward ways of her Southern family, both literally through a move to Los Angeles and figuratively through a divergence from them politically. (The jokes about politics inspire particular groans.) This is all very surface level, and we don’t understand her core. The film’s most effective moments, which are precious few, come when she plays these issues out with her mother, Celia Weston, whose return to a prominent screen role is deserving of a far better film. The thinness of the other party is embodied by Jenni’s bridesmaids, who make zero impression despite being in the movie from the start.
It’s hard to understate just how wildly this film swings between its polarities. It is broad even in its smaller moments, such as the secret language between Jenni and Jim in which they call each other complicated nicknames, the verbal version of a custom handshake. Ferrell’s lack of chemistry with Viswanathan, also seen in his interactions with Witherspoon, means that not only do these two not seem like father and daughter, they actually seem like complete strangers. Once we get on the small island, every complication is played out at its absolute highest volume, often with its meanest spirit, with none of the laughs to reward those choices.
When the conflicts in the two wedding parties reach their fever pitch with about 35 minutes remaining in the movie, it gives us an accurate sense of foreboding about how much gooey sentiment Stoller and company are trying to jam into this film’s final third. If you think you didn’t need 35 minutes of reconciliations between aggrieved parties at the end of this movie, you’re right.
You’re Cordially Invited has likeable performers top to bottom, but that’s the only thing saving it from the lowest numerical rating in ReelGood’s system. It’s not the type of movie that puts you in mind of giving out sympathy points. We’ve liked these people before and they will do great work again. This work is the polar opposite of great.
You’re Cordially Invited is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.