Idiot Savants

Avid churchgoers: John (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy (Vince Vaughn) celebrate yet another marriage pronouncement in Wedding Crashers. Photo Richard Cartwright. Courtesy New Line Productions.

Owen and Ben. Ben and Vince. Vince and Owen (and sometimes, Will). To those of a certain age and taste, these are just possible baby names. But for a large audience, the cinematic partner-swapping of Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson (and sometimes, Will Ferrell) is quality, name-brand comedy. So what exactly is that brand? It’s not Marx Brothers artful or Woody Allen sophisticated, nor is it entirely Frat Pig friendly, like the work of Saturday Night Live alums Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider. The films are as sky-high concept as anything put out there for the frat crowd — Stiller and Wilson as moronic male models in Zoolander; Vaughn and Ferrell as loser anchormen in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy; Vaughn and Stiller as idiot jocks in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story — but somehow, not quite as stupid (though stupid is a component).

What’s strange is that, with exceptions — Starsky & Hutch — these films are often met by muttered, sheepish affection amongst people who are not necessarily their target audience — i.e., teenage boys. Older, and, let’s face it, smarter people will defend Old School. They will not do the same for The Hot Chick.

Now Wedding Crashers, the great white hope of the declining movie industry, joins this dubious oeuvre. Wilson and Vaughn play John and Jeremy, divorce mediators who wait for spring, much like geese, so they can run wild on the Washington, D.C. wedding circuit, crashing strangers’ parties and getting laid by ripe-for-the-plucking bridesmaids. The appealing twist is that John and Jeremy (who often use names like “Saul and Herschel” or “Vikram and Salman”— whatever gets them through the door) aren’t just cake-and-booty predators; they genuinely love making balloon animals for the kids and hamming it up with the old folks. These guys are as turned on by the parties as they are by the women.

To top off a particularly successful season, the pair crash a luxe wedding thrown for the daughter of the federal treasury secretary (Christopher Walken, dialed down a few notches too many). While Jeremy deflowers one flaky daughter bridesmaid, Gloria (Isla Fisher), John falls hard for the bride’s other sister, an apple-cheeked, strong-headed environmentalist named Claire (Rachel McAdams). With Jeremy in tow, John follows his crush on a weekend retreat to a Hyannisport-type compound, where the buddies are thrown into comedic contact with several stereotypes borrowed from frattier pastures: Claire’s fiancé (Bradley Cooper), a vile northeastern social climber in boat shoes, the secretary’s depressive gay son (Keir O’Donnell) and granny the racist (Ellen Albertini Dow). These cutouts are the detritus of high-concept comedy, where the joke (male models! dodgeball!) comes before the story, and the characters after that.

When I look at the above paragraph, I think: how infantile, how sexist, how repellent. And then, almost reluctantly: how funny. There, I said it and I’m not ashamed: Wedding Crashers is funny. Vaughn does that logorrhea thing that has become his specialty, riffing in all directions on subjects from love to maple syrup, while Wilson is his usual laconic, confused self. Neither breaks new acting ground, but the casting works because Jeremy, like Vaughn, doesn’t think before he talks (or acts), while John, like Wilson, is increasingly crippled by dismay as he grows disillusioned with the go-go party-boy lifestyle. After one wedding, the two greet the dawn sitting on the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial, empty champagne bottles in hand, and Jeremy says: “Someday, you’ll look back on all this and laugh, and say we were young and stupid.” Replies John, slowly: “We’re not that young.”

Air head: John keeps the kids occupied with his balloon whimsy. Photo Richard Cartwright. Courtesy New Line Productions.

Right then, it’s clear why Wedding Crashers works. The comedy is juvenile, but finally, the guys aren’t. They’re as embarrassed by their shortcomings (and the shortcomings are where the laughs live) as we are of laughing at them. Even Old School, a movie about grown men starting their own fraternity that rides almost exclusively on physical gags involving Will Ferrell’s ass, has a certain softness (and it’s not just Will Ferrell’s ass), a sense that high-fivin’ white-guy hilarity is nothing to be proud of. It will fade. John and Jeremy are boy-men who want to become men-men but don’t know how to do it. Bigger stars like Sandler, or Jim Carrey in his earlier roles, do “bits” and “personae” rather than characters: Ace Ventura, Waterboy, Billy Madison. Personae cannot, under any circumstances, recede or evolve, and so eventually, the world must come around to their whacked-out point of view.

But in Wedding Crashers, the boy-men are average guys, and they must come around to the world. And now, appropriately, the actors are getting older. To put it kindly, Vaughn looks like crap on a stick; he’s paunchy, with a carousel’s worth of baggage under his eyes. Wilson is hanging on to his surfer golden-boy glow, but the lines on his face are deepening and the haircut is too floppy for his almost-40 head. (An uncredited, scene-stealing cameo by another famous boy-man shows our heroes the dark side of refusing to grow-up; this guy, too, has the balloon-jawed puff of a guy who hasn’t slept since the ’90s.) They need women to help them out of their chosen childishness, and Claire actually engages believably with John; the two flirt with each other, a change from so many modern comedies where the desired babe has the job of simply sitting, sponge-like and pretty, absorbing her co-star’s gags with a kill-me-now half-smile plastered across her made-up face. Gloria, too, seems at first like the typical movie stalker chick — kookaburra-laugher Fisher is totally wired; she can keep up with Vaughn — but by the end of the film, she is something quite different, and much more interesting.

A painful half-hour too long, Wedding Crashers often milks the very juvenilia it mocks so well. It is an adult film in more than theme, unapologetically R-rated with a lot of nudity (female, of course) and crudity, and somehow, that’s refreshing — a movie about sex that actually shows sex. There will be other boy-man movies, presumably, but wouldn’t it be nice if Wedding Crashers marked a graceful exit for Vaughn and Wilson, as it does for John and Jeremy, a breezy good-bye to their adolescent ways? In a few years, we might even see Wilson and Vaughn as names that stand alone. Grown men making us laugh without their buddies to cheer them on — a very mature idea.

Wedding Crashers opens Friday July 15.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.