FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL (1994)

The romantic comedy that made Hugh Grant a star both in England, where it was made in that country's quirky style, and America where it was a surprise smash hit, has a very different style of Grant's befuddled sarcasm...

Lacking the kind of edge and closure to one-liners (which there aren't many)... and for the most part his endearingly flaky persona has a plot-line all its own: to serve the female viewers, as this one's almost solely for them, a niche audience, before also relating to the guys who take the girls out, like NOTTING HILL, MICKEY BLUE EYES, MUSIC AND LYRICS, and a few others where Hugh stretched beyond the adorably vulnerable dreamboy...However the movie itself isn't squeaky-clean, and is a bit painfully stretched, especially the first wedding in which 35 minutes seems its own plodding 90-minute movie where the British characters, a collective of smug/judgemental friends serving their outlining more normal friends' weddings, are so quirky and offbeat there are few characters to balance them out, making their eccentric personalities roll into a one-note cliche...

Which improves as soon as the plot of Hugh Grant, basically in the same smitten-shoes that Emilio Estevez was in for the same actress, Andie McDowell, in ST ELMO'S FIRE... as in, both want her badly but some benign older guy's already got her... Yet Andie... always pretty... isn't all that great here, and hardly compels Hugh to pick up his game, with American Import written all over her comparably tame character to Hugh's zany friends that never stop talking...

 And perhaps that's the point: she was what he needed because he never had a few beats of silence now and again, for himself... But what WEDDING shapes into by the very end (a kind of THE GRADUATE for the 1990's) is a movie that's told well even when it's not as funny as it should be... with a primary character who both leads the story and watches others working hard (perhaps too hard) around him. Grade: B+