Considering the world has gone mad, this ought to be the ultimate era for chaos comedy: movies in which alligators are wrestled into bed, in which hoity-toity wedding guests get buzzed by passing motorboats, in which male strippers show up to bare their wares at the damnedest times. We need that kind of release valve right now. But we don’t really get it from writer-director Nicholas Stoller’s You’re Cordially Invited, a comedy that packs its gags so densely, and often so carelessly, that nothing much sticks. In an age of chaos, what we really need is focus, and You’re Cordially Invited chases down every distraction in sight.
Will Ferrell stars as Atlanta widower dad Jim, who takes great pride in having raised his daughter Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan), on his own. She’s grown up and moved out, but he prepares for her visits by baking three kinds of cookies and steaming the wrinkles from her clothes. It’s a bit much, but that’s the joke: he’s the dad who loves too much, and Jenni, while happy enough to go through the motions of their affectionate little routines, feels a bit constrained. When she shows up with her boyfriend in tow, Stony Blyden’s Oliver, and announces the two are engaged, Jim’s face falls like a saggy soufflé—he’ll never be ready to let her go. But he does want her to be happy, so he calls up the tony-quaint island inn where he and Jenni’s mother were married many moons ago and books the joint for their June 1 nuptials. Or at least he thinks he’s booked it.
Because over in Los Angeles, control-freak reality-TV-show producer Margot (Reese Witherspoon) has just learned that her beloved baby sister Neve (Meredith Hagner) has also become engaged. Neve is anxious because she believes her scarily conventional Southern family doesn’t approve of her fiancé, a hot-and-sweet male dancer named Dixon (Jimmy Tatro). Neve worries about this because she’s the the peacekeeper of the family, while Margot has almost completely estranged herself from them. She just can’t tolerate her highly judgmental mother, Flora (Celia Weston), and two unimaginative siblings, Rory Scovel’s Colton and Leanne Morgan’s Gwyneth. But she’ll do anything for Neve, and she wastes no time taking charge of the wedding, booking it immediately at a place that holds happy memories for the two bonded sisters—which just happens to be the same intimate little island establishment Jim has just reserved. The place can host only one wedding per weekend. What’s going to happen when two brides and their guests—one set consisting mostly of rowdy Gen Z-types, the other a more staid bunch decked out in tasteful navy blazers and flowery garden-party dresses—descend upon an island wedding venue that can barely handle half of them?
When these two disparate groups show up, Margot and Jim lock horns immediately, which is probably what brought you to You’re Cordially Invited in the first place, right? The idea of Ferrell and Weatherspoon in a romantic comedy—especially a chaotic romantic comedy—is appealing enough. But beyond some halfhearted sniping, these two rarely go at it. Ferrell’s semi-zonked out “What, me worry?” energy is moderately enjoyable. But he spends much of his time prattling through generation-gap jokes, reinforcing how hard it is for the “olds” to understand kids today. Jenni and her friends joyfully refer to one another as “bitches,” but they’re aghast when dad Jim refers to a woman as a “lady.” That could make for an OK throwaway joke, if you rebound off it quickly enough. Instead, the gag goes on for one beat, then two, then another, and before you know it, whether you’re a young or an old, we’re all into eye-rolling territory. The jokes don’t bounce or zigzag; they merely clonk against one another, feeling their way along in the dark.
Witherspoon fares a little better. An accomplished businesswoman, Margot bristles repeatedly when her family demeans her, especially Flora. As Flora, Weston gives the best performance in the movie, serving up choice icy-mom zingers as if they were morsels of red-velvet cake. Witherspoon seems to relish these exchanges; she’s good at playing these persnickety take-charge types, but she knows how to keep them from feeling like tired stereotypes. When Flora manages to deride Margot for her overachieving personality and her childlessness in one effortless glissando, Margot shoots back, “You just crammed so many insults into so few words it was like an insult haiku.” It’s funny, but it also feels believable in a prickly way—even parents who love us are sometimes all too capable of cutting us down.
But that’s also part of the problem with You’re Cordially Invited: it leans into so many knowing truths (at some point, parents just need to let their grown kids go; horrid moms often have reasons for behaving badly) that it ends up feeling passively self-helpy. Stoller has given us some enjoyable comedies (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Neighbors), and it seems that he genuinely wants to present us with more of the same: zaniness served up with a slight edge.
But You’re Cordially Invited isn’t particularly sharp or zany. And it takes forever for Jim and Margot to realize that they’re made—or at least semi-made—for one another. They kiss eventually, but boy, do you have to wait for it, and even then, it feels like something they should do rather than want to do. The movie’s setting, one of those fancy, old-fashioned, gracious Southern inns favored by white people with money, is pretty enough. There’s a dancing zebra—or, rather, a guy dressed up as one. And if you’re looking for a sight gag about the way boring folks from the suburbs all drive the same white Chevy Suburban, You’re Cordially Invited has that, too. It’s the kind of movie you can have running in the background, without paying it too much mind. We’re getting more and more of those these days. They’re not diversions—they don’t demand enough from us for that. Instead, they have a narcotic quality: they don’t seek to sharpen our senses but to dull them. That’s the opposite of what we need in an age of chaos. It’s OK to put an audience to work, to make us think on our feet—which is so much more enjoyable than dragging them.
