Zackham: The Big Wedding (2013)

One of the most bizarre stabs at late work of the last few years, The Big Wedding plays like Nancy Meyers or Nora Ephron on autopilot. It’s about a wedding that brings together a comically fractured family – and, although the ensemble cast stretches pretty wide, the focus is squarely on the older generation, which includes Robert de Niro, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton, Robin Williams and Christine Ebersole, who steals the show. To say that it’s flat is an understatement – this film is so oddly tone-deaf that it doesn’t even feel written by committee.  It’d be easy to dismiss it as sheer incompetence, a film on the verge of senility, but it feels there’s something deeper going on here, epitomised by the fact that it’s almost impossible to simply enjoy the actors themselves. Usually, in a film where great actors play bland roles, it’s possible to just luxuriate in their mere presence, their residual charisma - or at least your memory of their previous roles - but all that is quite strangely occluded here; there is no metaphysics of presence, no sense that that really is Diane Keaton standing in front of the camera. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that it’s based on a French film – every utterance feels dubbed, or translated, while the narrative itself is essentially a series of comic mistranslations. At the same time, though, it calls to mind recent speculations that, in the future, digital technology will progress to a point where we’ll be able to cinematically reincarnate dead actors and actresses for feature-length performances – that’s the world this world belongs to. At least, that accounts for its weird presenceless, the way it jettisons the audience in much the same way as a sitcom minus the laugh track. At moments, it doesn’t even feel made to be watched – it doesn’t contain the possibility of an audience in the manner of most films - giving a bit of a sense of what it might be like to experience Keaton, De Niro and Sarandon digitally revived for a 2113 audience, an audience who never knew them in the flesh; an archive of tics, postures and facial expressions that have been collected and preserved in anticipation of a new kind of posterity.