MOVIE REVIEWS : Here Comes the Bride, Warts and All

“Muriel’s Wedding” is the event Muriel wants so much to happen but fears never will. How is she to feel otherwise when her frightful best friends insist she surrender a bridal bouquet she’s just caught. “Give it back, give it back,” they yap at her like well-dressed terriers. “Nobody’s ever going to marry you.”

That scene, which opens P.J. Hogan’s marvelous debut film, sets the tone for what is to come. Wickedly mocking but empathetic, able to laugh at its characters while paying attention to their sorrows, this subversive comedy about self-esteem resists the notion that films have to timidly remain within tidy genre rules.

Winner of four Australian Academy Awards, including best picture, “Muriel’s Wedding” is the latest in a series of brash and rowdy comedies from that country that includes “Strictly Ballroom” and “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” Made with energy, raucous good humor and noticeable wit, its ability to recognize the poignancy in its situations makes it special even in that uninhibited group.

Played with take-no-prisoners comic enthusiasm by Toni Collette, 22-year-old Muriel Heslop is the kind of hapless young woman who wears a shoplifted leopard-skin dress to a wedding--and gets caught by the store detective. Overweight, with bad skin, a braying laugh and a frighteningly wide grin, aggressively unattractive Muriel is known locally in Porpoise Spit for saying and doing the wrong things. Even her taste in music, her devotion to Abba’s bubbly but outmoded melodies, makes her nominal friends wince.

And when it comes to matrimony, Muriel is so in love with the idea of being married that she is on intimate terms with every frame of Princess Di’s wedding tape. Glassy-eyed and obsessive on the subject, Muriel looks on a marriage license as a membership card in the human race that will prove to everyone, herself most of all, that she has finally become a worthwhile person.

Muriel comes by her insecurities the way most people do, through her dysfunctional blood relatives. Father Bill Heslop (veteran Australian actor Bill Hunter), known as “Bill the Battler” to his intimates, is a politician and influence-peddler whose hobby is running down everyone in his family, from his catatonic wife, Betty (Jeanie Drynan), to his horde of professional couch-potato children.

But though Muriel takes her fair share of abuse, she has something rare, and that is spirit. Though it tends to come out in unhelpful ways, like her weakness for telling strings of lies, that quality makes Muriel believe that some day things will go her way. “I know I’m not normal,” she says earnestly, “but I can change.”

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That passion also makes Muriel defy logic and seriously bend some rules to accompany her horrified trio of harpy girlfriends when they take a Club Med-type vacation on Hibiscus Island. There Muriel meets Rhonda (Rachel Griffiths), a full-bore party animal who truthfully says, “My whole life is one last fling after another.”

Unexpectedly, Rhonda responds to the free spirit in Muriel and the validation of that friendship proves liberating. It starts Muriel on a wild and chaotic journey of self-discovery, filled with wacky and eccentric plot turns, that will gradually cause her to rethink almost all her most cherished ideas.

Clearly, “Muriel’s Wedding” would be much less than it is without the right stars, and Collette, who has the courage not to shortchange Muriel’s more off-putting qualities, and Griffiths, who looks like a mature Juliette Lewis and makes Rhonda’s character believable, were both remarkable enough to win Australian Academy Awards. And the rest of the cast, even an old warhorse like Bill Hunter, completely catches the spirit of the piece and join forces as a gifted ensemble.

The credit for this has to go to writer-director Hogan and a production team led by co-producers Lynda House and Jocelyn Moorhouse (who directed the memorable “Proof” and is Hogan’s wife). They’ve come up with a slashing guerrilla attack on accepted notions of marriage, family and self-improvement that never allows us to forget the doubt that makes its characters human. Though it is consistently funny, “Muriel’s Wedding” is savvy enough not to play things just for laughs.

* MPAA rating: R, for sex-related dialogue and some sexuality. Times guidelines: The tone is more raucous than sensual.

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‘Muriel’s Wedding’ Toni Collette: Muriel Bill Hunter: Bill Rachel Griffiths: Rhonda Jeanie Drynan: Betty Gennie Nevinson: Deidre Matt Day: Brice Daniel Lapaine David Van Arkle Released by Miramax Films. Director P.J. Hogan. Producers Lynda House, Jocelyn Moorhouse. Screenplay P.J. Hogan. Cinematographer Martin McGrath. Editor Jill Bilcock. Costumes Terry Ryan. Music Peter Best. Production design Patrick Reardon. Art director High Bateup. Set decorators Jane Murphy, Glen W. Johnson. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

* In limited release in Southern California.