Licence to Wed: A Review

A few days ago, I watched Licence to Wed, a silly but fun romantic comedy from 2007. I was really surprised that I'd never even heard of this movie. I discovered it while browsing through movie titles on Amazon Prime. Considering it features Robin Williams (who has been a big star for decades) and John Krasinksi (who was a fairly big star in 2007 and has become considerably more visible since then), it's strange that it's so obscure, all the more so since it was a box office hit. The film also features several other actors from The Office, which is one of my favourite TV shows.

 It received terrible reviews, but that's almost more of a recommendation than otherwise.

I like romantic comedies. Unlike most other films they tend to be set in the world of everyday life, rather than in the worlds of crime, warfare, high finance, show business, and so forth. True, the "everyday life" of romantic comedies is usually a highly glamourised version of everyday life, but that's not the worst thing in the world. It's even a good thing, in many ways.

I've been watching Grey's Anatomy (my wife introduced me to it), and the presence of Patrick Dempsey (as Dr. Shepherd, or McDreamy) reminded me of a film we'd watched together in one of my first visits to America-- Made of Honour, a very silly and throwaway movie in which a male friend (the same Dempsey) is chosen by a bride-to-be as her maid of honour-- a maid-of-honour who happens to be male. I told you it was silly.

As silly as it was, I enjoyed it, and I have happy memories of it. Watching it in America influenced that. The funny thing about America is that it's a place where people expect to be happy. "The pursuit of happiness" is not an abstraction to Americans. They expect to be happy and they actively seek happiness. This has its downside, certainly, since it can lead to a lot of frustration and feelings of failure. But it also does achieve happiness to a suprising degree. The famous "get-up-and-go" of Americans is a real thing, and Americans are much less likely than Irish or British people to simply put up with their lot when it doesn't fulfil them.

Someone (Google tells me it was John Updike) once famously described America as "a vast conspiracy to make you happy". That could be debated, of course, but there's a lot of truth to it. There's a general sense in the air that life is for enjoying and that an enjoyable life is there for the taking. It's easy to be cynical about this, but the point is that when Americans say "have a great day" they actually mean it.

I couldn't have put words to this impression at the time, but it definitely added relish to a lot of the romantic comedies I watched with my wife, in our early days, in America. I had a strange feeling of having walked through the glass that separates the world of TV advertisements from the world I'd known. Everything seemed to glow a little. Love had something to do with it, of course, but it was also the cultural context.

Anyway, for whatever reason, Maid of Honour is the movie which is most associated, in my memory, with this atmosphere, and I had a strange hankering to watch it.

 

There was a particular scene in Maid of Honour which stuck in my mind especially. It's a scene in which the bride-to-be and Mr. maid-of-honour are planning out the wedding with the cleric who is going to officiate. (I forget what denomination he was; they probably left it vague.) Somehow it pleased me greatly that the wedding was going to be a church wedding and that the main characters were treating the ceremony with a suitable degree of respect. I liked that religion had a part in this world of achievable happiness.

So I found myself looking an American romantic comedy which featured a cleric. Licence to Wed fit that bill exactly.

The plot is very simple. A young couple (John Krasinski and Mandy Moore, as Ben and Sadie) decide to get married, and the bride-to-be wants to be married in her family church. It's mentioned that she hasn't attended it since her schooldays, but her family is friends with its pastor. The church is called St. Augustine's and its unmarried pastor wears a dog collar, but he's addressed as Reverend rather than Father. I assumed he was Episcopalian; some reviewers agree with me, some assume he's supposed to be Catholic. Again, I'm guessing it was left vague.

The Amazon Prime blurb describes Reverend Frank Littleton (who, of course, is played by Robin Williams) as a "charismatic pastor." We see him teaching a children's Catechism class, in which he is quizzing them on the Ten Commandments. Literally quizzing them; the answers are revealed on a gameshow-like answerboard, in rhyming phrases such as "It's not chill to kill."

Reverend Littleton tells that the church is fully booked out for weddings for two solid years...unless they are willing to take the only available slot, which is in three weeks. This means that Reverend Littleton's famous pre-marriage course (which has a one hundred per cent success rate in keeping couples together) will have to become a crash-course, shortened from three months to three weeks. Hilarity ensues, obviously.

One of the most interesting and ingenious features of this film is Reverend Littleton's juvenile sidekick, a precocious kid who is (we are told) part of a "ministers of tomorrow" programme. He follows the Reverend around everywhere and doesn't miss a trick, speaking familiarly of the past cases they've worked on. Given all the sex abuse scandals, this plot point is a little bit eyebrow-raising, but it's actually a very funny and original device.

Predictably, Reverend Frank shows no surprise that the engaged couple are already living and sleeping together. Less predictably, he insists they abstain from sex for the whole duration of the course. The groom-to-be is incredulous at this, and tries to persuade his fianceé to overlook this rule. (It's depressingly predictable that the man is the one pushing for sex; all men are relentlessly horny in Hollywood's eyes. A bit of role reversal here might have been refreshing.)

In any case, the amorous Ben hasn't reckoned with the Reverend Littleton. The resourceful pastor has bugged their apartment, and just as Sadie's resistance was about to break, he comes knocking. In fact, he was sitting in the street outside, listening in to their nocturnal interactions.

Many critics attacked this plot device as "creepy". I didn't find it creepy-- this is a romantic comedy, for crying out loud!-- but it does raise logistical questions. How long could a busy pastor spend sitting in that van?

 

There's not much mention of Christian doctrine in the movie. In one amusing scene, while Reverend Frank is shooting hoops with Ben, the basketball hits the latter in the face and gives him a nosebleed. For some minutes, the pastor tries to perform a healing miracle on the injured groom-to-be, before revealing it all as a joke and sending him to the doctor. That's about as Christian as this movie gets. But the treatment of religion is still fairly respectful.

The storyline is very similar to Anger Management, the 2003 comedy starring Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson. In both movies, a male character has to satisfy a demanding and eccentric (but ultimately benevolent) guru in order to win the girl. In both movies, the demands of the guru are apparently crazy and even sadistic, but are eventually seen to make sense.

So what kind of demands are made of the engaged couple? Well, in one scene, at a party where Ben is mingling with is future-in-laws, Reverend Frank encourages them to play a game of word association. When a member of the family is named, Ben has to come up with a word to describe them. He begins very politely, of couse, but is goaded by the Reverend and the family themselves to be more honest. Eventually, as one would expect, he goes to the opposite extreme, scandalising his future relatives. In another scene, Sadie has to drive a car through busy traffic blindfolded, while her husband-to-be gives her directions.

 

One of the funnier moments in the film comes when Ben is collecting his wife's engagement ring. He's asked for the words "never to part" to be inscribed upon it, but his unclear handwriting results in the ring being inscribed "never to fart". (They assumed it was a "novelty inscription".) There follows a prolonged dispute in which different members of staff, and a customer, are asked to read Ben's handwriting; no prizes for guessing what every one of them reads it as. Yes, it's cheap humour, but it gets a laugh.

This being a romantic comedy, it inevitably climaxes in a crisis, the bride-to-be getting cold feet at the eleventh hour and the marriage apparently called off. (Once again, it has to be the woman who has doubts; it's never the man, is it?) Can Reverend Frank save the day? Well, if you can't bear the suspense of wondering, watch the movie. Even if you can bear the suspense, it might be worth watching anyway.