It’s one of the classic movie tropes: two travellers divided by temperament and experience—the socialite and the scientist, the heiress and the reporter, the criminal and the prosecutor—are thrown together by circumstances, squabbling along the way and falling in love. That’s the premise of “Destination Wedding,” written and directed by Victor Levin, which will be released in theatres on Friday and digitally a week later, which is promising in principle: it features a pair of the most idiosyncratic stars of our time, Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves, who are front and center throughout. Frank (Reeves) and Lindsay (Ryder) meet at an airport en route to the wedding of Frank’s brother, who is also Lindsay’s ex—and for whom they share an enduring hatred, which seems to be just about all they share. They start bickering mere moments into their chance encounter.
Yet the movie is, for the most part, excruciating—a bewildering, deadening experience that, for all its emphasis on its great actors, leaves them to display their talents and exert their craft in a cinematic and psychological void. They do all the work to bring a head-scratching script and neutered images to life, and they do it with energy and enthusiasm, yet I found myself watching the film with embarrassment for them, for the actions that they were directed to perform in service of a grotesquely misconceived movie. Levin displays his concept and his vision as writer and director, but I’m reminded of André Bazin’s line regarding the notion of directors as auteurs: “Authors, yes—but of what?”
What’s remarkable and daring about “Destination Wedding” is that it takes place in a mere handful of long dialogue scenes, some that seem to run ten minutes or more. Frank is a gruff, dour corporate executive who works out obsessively and faces life cynically. Lindsay is a voluble, confrontational social activist who, despite her shattering experience years earlier with Frank’s brother (he left her five weeks before their planned wedding), remains a romantic at heart. Their encounter takes place in the course of a single weekend, and it’s composed mainly of a pair of scenes in an airplane (coming and going), a pair at the airport, one at the rehearsal dinner, one on a festive countryside outing, and one in bed. Which is to say that, in a classic-movie sense, there’s almost no action; the film rises or falls on the nature and the quality of its talk.
But Levin films the actors talking with no visual imagination or intimacy whatsoever, as if his great (and apt) respect for their talent led him to keep his distance, to avoid proximity to their aura. He creates a middling and vague proscenium, a set of virtual theatre frames in which they can stand (or, for the most part, sit) and deliver their lines, but even that series of frames is wan and familiar. Rather than emphasizing the tightrope audacity of the performers’ lengthy dialogue, he films the performances like protracted versions of more or less any conventional dialogue scene, intercut to trim out slip-ups and clean up the dialogue. Levin neither accepts nor grants his actors the risk of his setup.
Even more disheartening is the script itself, which consists of a series of rapid-fire riffs that revolve with a narrow dramatic insistence on the movie’s main idea, the possibility of pursuing romance and accepting love despite emotional wounds. It’s a good, true, classic subject—but one that draws its force from specifics, and it’s specifics that Levin doesn’t know how to write. The height of empty and cringe-inducing contrivance is a scene that’s intrinsically difficult to film: a sex scene. Wandering through the wild landscape, Lindsay and Frank find themselves facing a mountain lion. Frank (in an all-too-conventional touch) fends it off with an intentional bit of chivalry that he then apostrophizes at length. As they flee, Lindsay tumbles down a hill; Frank comes to her aid, kisses her, and—after she pushes him away, he apologizes, and she leaps ahead to kiss him—they decide to have sex.
Sex scenes are the bane of the modern cinema. Actors shouldn’t be asked to do them, at least, not in any realistic fashion. If they’re of any merit at all, they do more than illustrate the plot point that characters are having a sexual relationship; the good ones convey an idea about character, or, for that matter, about sex itself, and are conspicuously stylized, shifted away from both illustration and titillation. In “Destination Wedding,” Levin at least tries to craft a distinctive approach to a sex scene, but the result, instead of avoiding the subgenre’s pitfalls, lands in the worst of them while also inventing new disasters of its own. On a hillside in the wild, with no foreplay and no intimacy, Frank pumps away—and, for about four or five minutes, he and Lindsay thrust and talk, talk and thrust, with the lower parts of their bodies skillfully concealed at the edge of the frame or at a great distance, and they talk, and talk, and talk, with the same spiralling chatter, about impersonal trivia.
He doesn’t have a condom; is she worried about getting pregnant? No, but for no apparent reason. He was taught to use two condoms so that if one breaks, he has another; but the friction between the two would rather make the first one tear. Does he have any diseases? No. But then, mid-thrust, he calls out, “Crabs!” “You have crabs?” No: he sees actual crabs, crawling near them. Lindsay turns her head and identifies the creatures as tarantulas, and the subject of conversation—as they move together with all the passion and pleasure, humanity and curiosity of a piston and a cylinder—then becomes tarantulas. I won’t repeat here what happens when they reach orgasm, but it’s at the same exalted level of childish, faux-sophisticated contrivance. Seeing and hearing Ryder and Reeves go through these grimacing, grinding simulations while churning out cringe-inducing dialogue written in the self-congratulatory language of screenwriter-ese made me wish that they were somewhere else at the time and were actually C.G.I.’d in.
What transpires, when the couple moves the action into the bedroom, is similarly chattery and clattery but utterly unrevealing, except of Levin’s willful efforts to build a relationship through talk alone. The problem with these scenes isn’t their comedy, their absurdity, or their incongruity; it’s their particular execution. The modern cinema begins in the bedroom (the twenty-minute-plus scene in “Breathless,” complete with its comedic sex scene under a blanket), and in talk (the documentary-based idea, whether in films by Jean Rouch, Robert Drew, or Éric Rohmer, that lets real-life participants and scripted characters alike give voice to a wide range of experiences and ideas and constructs films with revealing digressions in mind). The best thing that “Destination Wedding” does is to display its intentions: Levin admirably replants his film’s classical romantic-comedy framework in a cinematically modern context. But that idea is merely a start. The film’s supposed musings and meanderings are channelled and narrow yet unfocussed, lacking both a true sense of complexity and freedom and the pointed precision of dialogue in classic Hollywood’s eccentric offshoots.
The next best thing that the film does is to emphasize the speaking voices of its stars. Both Reeves and Ryder talk so much that the timbre of their voices, even with the antic inflections that their roles require, is more substantial than anything they’re saying. It’s the squandering of such formidable presences in artistic contexts so different from the ones in which they’ve been seen of late that makes the impersonal filming and garish writing of “Destination Wedding” all the more dismaying.
Sourse: newyorker.com
