The Wedding

Things I liked about The Wedding:

Halle Berry - fresh, beautiful, talented, what a lovely smile... the environment, the sets, the costumes (colors, styles, characterization), the lights and the colors of the scenes... the pear, the shore line, the woods, Marta's Vineyard sure must be a beautiful place. The beautiful white houses, the make-up displayed, the hairdos, the lines, the fact that it doesn't show violence, the fact that it deals with individual choice and the effect our choices have in others life. It suites the purpose of a TV movie, it has a message, it is clean, and healthy subject to watch and to think about. It's nice.

Many wonderful minutes of beautiful Halle Berry in tight mauve or peach pants and white tops. Warm, charming, and a joy to see.

THE WEDDING explores the times and trials of a clan of some of the more elite upper-class African Americans living in the eastern USA in the early 1950's. There are more family conflicts than a viewer can shake a stick at. however, the pacing is slow and the background music reeks of pure "Made-for-TV" sad to say.

More troubling, the production is rife with needless and unexplained flaws. One is that all through the movie it is repeatedly well established that a lighter skin complexion is very highly desired and negro features are less revered. When one daughter marries a darker black man, although he is a medical doctor and a good man, many in daughter's family reject the husband-to-be only because of skin complexion. OK, fine.

But there is logical difficulty because a "very handsome" black man, apparently single and available, moves in next door to the wedding house. The same family and neighborhood elders who uniformly scorn the black doctor are seen admiring the new neighbor. The unexplained problem is that the new neighbor is by far the darkest skinned man with the most negro features in the whole cast. The fact that this man is darker and more African looking than others is completely ignored throughout the script as if the director mis-cast the part of the neighbor and hoped viewers would be too dumb to notice.

Another sign of a weak script is found in the scene where the white fiance announces bad news about his parents expected arrival for the wedding. The scene was simply unrealistic. In real life, mature adults have an idea about how to break bad news with SOME tact. What was said and the way it was said was overly and needlessly blunt, awkward and ill-timed.

Ending at the beginning, watching Halle Berry was the best part of the movie for me.

Overall, I thought this was a self-indulgent, long-winded film. I didn't read the book and was fascinated to read how different it was. Still predictable is the glorification of "poor" and rich or accomplished as somehow suspect. All of these are the same kind of stereotypes as the film attempts to criticize.

There are certainly some good moments but most of the time, I forced myself to watch so I could finally see how it ended. I'm sorry to say, it wasn't worth the wait. The best part of the film is of course the gorgeous Halle Berry, who doesn't have to do much to be spectacular, and the portrayal of upper class black society. That was as much a revelation as Spielberg's film in which we learned the little known fact that slavery was begun in Africa and there were Black free men in the North during slavery--something of which many people are completely unaware.

Additionally, I don't see bias towards interracial marriage here. I see bias against building enough character development to have us care about the people.

I first met (and fell in love with) Halle Berry in Alex Haley's `Queen' (1993), TV mini series of some 259 minutes, shown here in Europe in two episodes. An excellent production with careful directing and good acting, especially from the beautiful Halle, even including the necessary aging which takes place throughout the film. I next found her as Khaila in `Losing Isiah' (1995), which was not bad, I suppose, just too predictable, although some scenes showed some pretty good interpretative skills. However, Charles Burnett's job on `The Wedding' – and Halle's attempt to play out the story – was just dreadfully, drearily dismal. There was little imagination, negligible capacity to make the characters `feel' alive, real; it just simply turned out to be another saga-like drudge. Whether a half-black lovely young woman can or shouldn't marry a perfectly white jazz musician, or whether she should or mustn't marry a an honestly black man, is just so out of date, it does not rub off. You would have to be really off your head for the beautiful Halle Berry, or simply an avid consumer of glossy women's mags to be able to stomache this film. Give it a miss.

The Wedding (1998) was a fine attempt to bring to life a brilliant book. Although I understand that Oprah Winfrey may have wanted to have "stars" in her movie, aesthetically they just don't fit. The book states again and again that the Coles family could have "passed" for white had they wanted to. There is a very important part of the book that describes the day Shelby got lost and everyone (read: white) thought they were looking for a little "colored" girl and therefore it couldn't be this beautiful BLUE-EYED, BLOND-HAIRED, little girl...until she tells them her name, and then they're horrified.

Although I think this cast did a wonderful job, I can't help but be bothered by the blatant disregard for a major plot point in Dorothy West's novel. That being said, if the viewer is aware beforehand, I think this movie is worth seeing simply because there are so few factual representations of African-Americans in the media. I know many African-American families that live and act as the Coles family does; I have yet to meet an African-American family that lives or acts the way the Parkers do.