Top End Wedding (2019) - Movie Review

I’ve ragged on romantic comedies a fair bit in past reviews. Part of that is simply the nature of the beast, since rom-coms tend to make for rather clichéd viewing even at the best of times, but I feel like I haven’t the sub-genre nearly enough credit. I mean, with both critics and general audiences, rom-coms tend to be the most accessible features to get into, and that accessibility can lead to some opportune moments for demographics to get screen time. I looked at this last year with Crazy Rich Asians, a film that was ostensibly just a standard narrative boosted tremendously by its cultural aesthetic. Today’s film very well could have the chance to do the same thing for Tiwi indigenous Australians, but… I can’t lie, I’m not nearly as hyped about this one.

Not that there’s nothing here worth lauding, though. Director Wayne Blair and DOP Eric Murray Lui wield a lot of natural scenery to their advantage, from the sun-scorched Northern Territory to the serene Tiwi Islands, and as the latest slice of Australiana-on-film, it works decently at tapping into very specific landmarks. Not sure what that says about us culturally when seeing brands like Spotlight on the big screen feels as local as it does, but nevertheless, this feels like an accurate look at our country and a few of its intercultural frictions.

When it isn’t highlighting the always-prevalent whiteness of some of the supporting characters, from the British-accented groom’s side of the family that feels like the ghost of colonial past, to the weird running gag of the bride’s father locking himself in a closet and weeping while Chicago’s If You Leave Me Now plays in the background (being sad at what Peter Cetera turned Chicago into is admittedly an appropriate response), it stays centred on Miranda Tapsell’s Lauren and her varyingly strained relationship with her own background. The story at large mostly amounts to a road trip flick with her trying to track down her mother so she can be there for the wedding, where she and the audience learn more about the mother and her own connection to the larger mob.

Or, at least, that’s the intention. It ends up coming across more like this film should have been focused on the mother right from the start, since what we learn about her random road trip ultimately sounds like more interesting pit stops than what we get from Lauren and Gwilym Lee’s Ned. There’s also the unfortunately wonky sense of humour on display, which makes things a little awkward since the aforementioned Chicago closet is the closest this gets to definable long-term humour: Laughing at a man crying over his wife leaving him. I’d be a lot more annoyed with that prospect if it weren’t for the far bigger problem that ends up overshadowing it. A problem that ends up dooming up a lot of rom-coms out there: The logistics behind the plot.

Without detailing every single moment in the story, let’s just say that the contrivances to keep things moving are irritatingly plentiful. It’s like the writers thought that a bog-standard wedding wasn’t nearly stressful enough and decided to artificially enhance it, throwing in everything from a time limit to get everything done to numerous moments of split-second cancellation followed by equally-impulsive reinstatement of the titular wedding. It’s all so cluttered and frenzied and not nearly as light as the tone keeps insisting that it keeps sapping away at the heart of the romance and the comedy.

I don’t want to entirely hand-wave this film’s cultural representation, since Tiwi culture isn’t something we see a lot of in media, big screen or small. And to the filmmakers’ credit, it seems like they were trying to do justice to certain ideas surrounding familial and ethnic estrangement. But between the limp comedy, the hazy romance, the hectic pacing, and the frankly stupid contrivances behind all three, it’s seriously difficult to fully appreciate that representation when it’s surrounded by and filled with so much tedium.