"Muriel's Wedding"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                              March 25, 1995

    "Muriel's Wedding" is a very surprising film. An Australian import, it was
written and directed by someone I know nothing about (not even his/her
gender), P. J. Hogan, and produced by two women Lynda House and Jocelyn
Moorehouse. What was surprising to me, having seen only the previews, is what
a complexly plotted feminist film it is. The previews made you think it was a
simple-minded paean to heterosexual matrimonial bliss couched in the story of
an ugly-duckling who makes good by making a good marriage, end of story. Well,
that's not what it is, at all. Rather, it's a biting denunciation of the
venality of a patriarchal society that spins the myths that keep women
subjugated: the beauty myth, the myth of finding Mr. Right and living happily
ever after, the myth that women's worth is determined by the men she can
attract.

    It IS a film about an ugly-duckling, Muriel Hyslop, by name (Toni
Collette), eldest daughter of a blowhard local politico in the northern
Australian beach town of Porpoise Spit (photographed with all the saturated
color phony cheeriness David Lynch used in the opening shots of Blue Velvet).
Muriel is an only slightly more functional young woman than Sweetie was in
Jane Campion's film of the same name. In other words she's a mess outside and
in, and no wonder--she's a member of one of the most dysfunctional families
you've ever seen on screen, including her mother, Betty, and several other
children most of whose lights seem to have long since gone off. No doubt it
has a lot to do with Bill Hyslop's penchant for humiliating and belittling
them in public at every opportunity. Needless to say, self-esteem is something
in short supply in the Hyslop family. Muriel's "friends" are no better; she
tries to hang out with a group of the self-proclaimed "top" young women in the
town who work hard at being thin and pretty and attractive to the  most
desirable young men and who would (and do) betray one another at the bat of an
eyelash in this pursuit. The film is divided into three sequences and the
first one "Bouquet" opens at the wedding of one of these brittle young women
and when she heaves her wedding bouquet like a missile and Muriel is the one
who catches it, they have no qualms about telling her she needs to give it to
someone else because, she--fat, unattractive, Muriel--will never get a man to
marry her. They tell her she can't go with them on the resort vacation they
had planned.

   Muriel steals the money from her father to go anyway, by herself, and meets
another young woman, Rhonda (Rachel Griffiths) who had dropped out of school
about the same time Muriel did and who had been tormented by the same group of
"elites." Rhonda's lights have definitely not gone out and she gets her
revenge against her erstwhile tormentors and then some.

    In the second sequence, "Sydney: City of Brides" Muriel and Rhonda go off
to Sydney where Muriel changes her name to Mariel and tries to change who she
is. A close bond develops with Rhonda (reminiscent in some ways here of the
women-bonding of "Boys on the Side") and Muriel does gain some self-confidence
and independence, and she begins to understand  to some extent that she is a
valuable person. Still, she can't shake the sense that her worth depends on
her ability to "win" by becoming a bride so she starts secretly haunting
bridal shops, trying on dresses and getting them to take polaroids of her that
she puts in a wedding album. The precipitates a crisis with Rhonda and sends
Mariel off in the third sequence, "The Wedding." to fulfill her dream of
getting married, no matter what. And she pulls off a dream wedding of such
proportions that she ends up on the cover of all the women's magazines and is
the envy of even the young women who scorned her back at Porpoise Spit. This
is not, however, the happy  ending of this movie, and her rich, handsome,
famous bridegroom not the answer to her prayers. You'll have to see the film
yourself to see how the plot twists and turns from this point on out.

   I need to stress that despite the seriousness of the themes here, the film
is highly satirical and often very funny. A favorite funny scene of mine is
one where Muriel brings a young man back to her Sydney apartment who, in his
inept eagerness to unzip her trendy leather pants, mistakenly unzips the
leather "beanbag" sofa they're on and suddenly there are little styrofoam
pellets everywhere, leaving Muriel howling with laughter and the poor young
man thoroughly bewildered.

  So "Muriel's Wedding" is serio-comedy of a high order that I think feminists
will cheer for as it casts a spotlight on some of patriarchy's most cherished
myths and shows how destructive they can be--and that they can be overcome.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and
Film.
   Copyright 1995 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not
reprint this review without the permission of the author.