Forum Overview :: The Netflix Instant Forum :: Young Adult

[quote name="Mischief Maker"]Years ago I was dragged into watching "My Best Friend's Wedding" a strange combination of chick flick and black comedy about a narcissistic Julia Roberts who has an age-panic after receiving a wedding invitation from an old flame and decides the best course of action is to break up the wedding and marry him herself. I didn't like it. I do, however, like Patton Oswalt, and so I took a chance on this movie which was billed as a quirky indie version of that film with Patton serving as comic relief. This film knocks it out of the park in terms of setting up a huge red herring, but the red herring is so well set up that it's very very easy to miss the twist. The twist didn't sink in for me until a couple hours after watching and even professional critics like Roger Ebert missed it, saying that Theron's character is incredibly unlikable and becomes less and less likable as the film goes on. The female critics have been especially (viciously) wrong. Without delving into spoiler territory, let's just say this is a completely different film the second time around. *SPOILERZ* The red herring is the idea that she's coming back to her home town to recapture her high school glory days. In fact, Charlize Theron's character is the least interested in high school of any of the cast. While she dated Patrick Wilson in High School, they were still together in college and she got pregnant at 20, which lead to a miscarriage and her learning that she's infertile. Presumably she and Wilson broke up after that and the film makes clear that he hasn't kept in touch. Theron is in a bad place at the start of the film, tasked with (ghost) writing a story that's the end of a series (leaving her future security in doubt) and struggling with a combination of depression and writer's block. Suddenly out of nowhere a long-silent Wilson sends her an email with a picture of his newborn baby. Already in a vulnerable state, she becomes obsessed with why he would suddenly break his silence with a message that hits her where she's most vulnerable. It becomes too much to ignore and she ships off to her hometown. There she runs into Oswalt, who had a huge crush on her in high school but never got the courage to talk to her. Over drinks she realizes that he's "hate crime guy" who was brutally beaten and mutilated by jocks in high school who mistakenly thought he was gay. On the second viewing it becomes abundantly clear that she feels a real connection with him when he talks about how he's had to resign himself with living with broken genitals (too). She drunkenly voices her secret hope that the reason Wilson contacted her was to escape his marriage and take her back and Oswalt takes it seriously. This sets in motion the three way dynamic of the film. Patrick Wilson's weird behavior isn't because he's a nice guy trying to be polite and true to his wife at the same time, he's trying to avoid the subject of how he dumped Theron after the miscarriage and inadvertantly sends out misleading signals ("Why did you invite me?"). Patton Oswalt's character isn't the wise jaded onlooker he thinks he is, in fact he's so wrapped up in his self pity that he completely misses all the times Theron makes a pass at him until she finally comes onto him as bluntly as possible. When Charlize Theron is writing her fictionalized self's inner monologue about how everyone misinterprets her and underestimates her intelligence because of her beauty, it isn't a sign that her character is a shallow conceited bitch, it's the exact situation happening throughout the entire movie. Nobody listens to her and everyone views her through a lens they fabricated back in high school. Bizarre that none of the female critics I read picked up on that situation, they were all catty reviews about how even through Theron's character looks beautiful on the outside, she's actually really ugly on the inside. If the lesson of the movie is that nobody listens to pretty women, least of all other women, it proved that point and then some![/quote]