Four Weddings & a Funeral - Revisited.

I recently re-watched Four Weddings and a Funeral and immediately was obsessed all over again with Kristin Scott Thomas’ Fiona. Forget her role in the English Patient, this character is her true metier. That insouciance, the cool, the aristocratic matter-of-fact-ness in which she tells Hugh Grant’s character she loves him while giving the impression she’s filing an overdue tax return is a lesson in damning a man with faint praise that we all should practice from time to time. Heaven forbid that actual emotions with gobs of mascara running down her face should be involved. That smile masking who-knows-what angst is totally wasted on Hugh. I lapped it up with a bulldozer. The second she reveals her love, the movie’s focus should have shifted to her. That’s the movie I want to see. Watching it again, it’s deflating knowing her sass is being squandered on Hugh’s Charlie. The guy can’t even look good in shorts for chrissakes. Those that think this is a Hugh Grant film are sadly mistaken. 

...I'd have the hat too.

I wanted and still want these three things: Fiona’s looks, that braggadocio to tell exceptionally good-looking (but foppish) men that they love them without breaking a sweat and appear not to give a damn, but most importantly I want that knowingness, even in a moment of naked vulnerability, that it's not her who's missing out but the feckless Charlie. You know it’s true; Kristin Scott Thomas drops bird shit all over Andie McDowell’s character. And Charlie is exposed as a twat while promptly losing all complexity and nuance when Fiona tells him of her affection. Andie McDowell is perfectly nice in this movie. She gets to be the one who’s had the most fun sexually, she’s the American who works for Vogue, she marries a Scottish laird who clearly has halitosis and probably does unsavory things while wearing his clan tartan but she’s so insipid. Charlie runs around metaphorically, physically, idiotically mooning over this woman while a little off center, Fiona is calmly smoking Marlboro Lights while tossing gorgeously enunciated bon mots and killer looks into a black hole. 

The movie would've gone straight to DVD if the secondary characters weren’t so appealing (if a tad cliched). Simon Callow as Gareth unleashes almost a parody of a gay gent but pulls it back from the brink because the ridiculous fun he has with the character is contagious. The gentle but barbed mockery as he tells an American woman that he’ll arrange a meeting with Oscar Wilde is perfectly cruel in a teddibly British way. He was the gay you wanted as your closest confidant long before Rupert Everett turned up as Julia Roberts’ beard in My Best Friend’s Wedding. 

Charlie’s room mate Scarlett is also the perfect foil for our cow-eyed hero: a mix of ditzy minx and welcome relief for Hugh’s upper class hair and bumbling ways. It thrilled me that she ends up with the American jock and probably rides off into the sunset to the early days of Burning Man where they have tantric sex for the rest of their lives. Lucky ducks. 

And there are cameos with actors that have gone onto bigger things that I particularly enjoyed. The very excellent Nicola Walker is a truly frightful folk singer and I had to pause the frame to confirm my suspicions that it was actually her. A quick aside: anyone looking for a box set recommendation must take a look at Unforgotten. Brilliant!

And lastly, the exceptional Anna Chancellor as the hapless Henrietta kills it as the twice-jilted girlfriend. I’ve always had a massive girl crush on Anna C. (What can I say, I'm a sucker for tall women). There's something that delights me about a particular flavor of English gel which she embodies. A certain I-don’t-give-a-fuck and I say it with the poshest of drawls with a top note of nasal discharge gets me going every time. She didn’t realize she’d dodged a bullet when Charlie left her at the altar.

A far more fitting end to the movie should’ve been with Kristin and Anna together at last after marriages to chinless Englishmen. They both have had a couple of kids apiece and as their youngest are finishing their O-levels at Bedales and/or heading off to Thailand for a gap year, the two of them bump into each other on the Heath and bingo - it’s the happier version of Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville West. The two of them elope to Wales and start an exclusive porcelain business called Duckface that the Duchess of Cambridge is obsessed with. 

You know I’m right.