You’ve got to wonder what goes on in Forest Whitaker’s head. There are few actors working today that can match him for careening wildly between great work and utter turkeys. Already this year he’s appeared in the universally panned Repo Men and now he shows up as a philandering radio DJ in Our Family Wedding. For some reason, Forest has read to the end of a script which involves him being sexually assaulted by a Viagra chomping goat and said yes. Puzzling.
Other than that little mystery, Our Family Wedding has very little to tickle the brain cells. It presents itself as a wedding movie with a racial twist as a Mexican woman (Ugly Betty’s America Ferrera) finds her family less than thrilled to accept her black fiancé. Well it’s been over forty years since Katharine Houghton brought Sidney Poitier home to meet the folks in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner –what, you might well ask, is left to say about the subject? As it turns out, not a hell of a lot.
The film has very little to say about interracial marriage or prejudice between the non-white communities in modern America. In fact, apart from a few misjudged and utterly lazy jokes (which never raise above the dubious quality of “I’ll be right black”) the fact that this is an interracial marriage is of very little importance to the narrative at all. Curiously, most of the prejudice on display here is intraracial. Both of the central families are comfortably well off, intelligent and upwardly mobile whereas their poorer, more ethnic relatives are racial stereotypes of the most embarrassing kind. Harpies with hair-weaves on one side, Mexican gang members and yokels on the other.
I could get righteously offended at all of this but honestly, the film is so silly and inconsequential I don’t think it’s worth taking up any of your precious time in doing so dear reader. The only thing that caused me to sit up in my seat was the appearance of Charlie Murphy, who supplements his already surreal presence (looking like a Spitting Image version of his more famous brother) by gurning like a man in the midst of a nasty seizure. At the end of the day this is just another wedding film in the theme of Father of the Bride; predictable, saccharine and lacking in laughs.