‘Perfect paternalistic nonsense’: why Father of the Bride is my feel-good movie | Steve Martin

I should hate this movie. A possessive father loses the plot at the notion that his 22-year-old daughter – a sophisticated architecture student just returned from a semester in Rome – is engaged to a man he has never met. After she tells him the news at dinner, we see her say it a second time through his eyes, as a septuagenarian. When the groom arrives, Dad nearly suffers an aneurysm when he dares to put his hand on her leg, and starts watching America’s Most Wanted every night looking for his face. He goes so crazy over the prospect of their wedding that he loses it in the supermarket and briefly ends up in jail. “I was no longer the man in my little girl’s life,” he laments. It’s paternalistic nonsense, and it’s perfect.

I first saw the 1991 remake of Father of the Bride (FOTB) as a kid because it’s my dad’s favorite movie. As his only daughter, I categorically refuse to read this, although I enjoyed telling my boyfriend when I made him endure my latest rebuke. (About my 975th viewing; his first and, I suspect, only.) It’s the movie that made me fall in love with Steve Martin, our paranoid FOTB George Banks, and Diane Keaton, optimistic MOTB Nina, who I came to to consider as my cinematic parents, a comfort when I see them on screen.

It is arguably neither of their best works, as they arrive at the end of their respective imperial periods in Hollywood. (Anyone who claims that Keaton’s was the ’70s obviously hasn’t seen 1987’s Baby Boom, another of my favorite regressive capers.) Keaton is a bit underused to play George’s sensible foil—though, as is her divine right, can still preside over a magnificent kitchen, for this is a film co-written by Nancy Meyers and directed by her then-husband Charles Shyer – and Martin is the ne plus ultra of wasp chewing and eye gouging that set the tone for an exemplary farce.

One of my absolute favorite tropes on screen is any character who declares, “It’s the 90s – get used to it!” I would read a whole book about the history of the line: who said it first? What do they mean?? Here, at least, it means good luck in the face of rampant capitalism. Rococo wedding planner Franck Eggelhoffer, played by a named Martin Short with an accent of, say, indefinite Eastern European extraction, spouting “walk to ze 90s, Aunt Bonks!” when George pulls together at the expense of “de kaak” (the cake).

Certainly, George rocks some exemplary 90s normcore looks in this film, including sneakers manufactured by his company, and their young later-in-life son Matty (an adorable Kieran Culkin) has a Simpsons drawing on his bedroom door. But in the bridal context, FOTB is pure post-Diana 80s fluff: meringue dresses, a jazzy wedding singer played by Eugene Levy, swans dyed pink to match the tulips, of course. It is, as Franck declares, taking place in the Bankses’ sprawling family home in a very Norman Rockwell California neighborhood. fabulous.

A sympathetic reading could see George’s freakout about the wedding as a justified response to the absurdity of the wedding industrial complex, but where would the fun be in that? Plus, as George’s sanity crumbles, the movie makes it very clear that he’s the unreasonable one here for not wanting to spend $250 per head on guests. He spies the in-laws and falls into their pool. In an attempt to save money, he buys a black “Armani” suit that may or may not have fallen off the back of a truck. Franck tries to help him sew a button back on the morning of the wedding, but has the wrong color thread and informs him that Armani does not make a “navy blue tuxedo” nor does it use polyester.

And what about Brian, the groom? He is a gender politics-savvy new man who supports his fiancee’s career and almost always cries. He is not, FOTB makes clear, the love story that matters here.

Why do I keep coming back to this movie again and again? As a girl and younger woman, I was emphatically against marriage (though I’ve since mellowed) and saw it as more of a comedy horror than anything hopeful. The only aspect of the Bankses’ life I wish was the kitchen. And yet, watching Franck and the family put on their ridiculous show makes me want to be a part of it. I love ritual and ceremony, and Steve Martin, and Martin Short, and Diane Keaton.

I’m so into FOTB that when Vampire Weekend started teasing something called FOTB a few years ago, I tweeted a joke that I hoped it was a concept album about the movie. The publicist emailed to ask how I knew the album was really called Father of the Bride and why I had leaked embargoed information. I didn’t have that; the acronym is just engraved so deep in my soul. Now I bet you will never guess what happens in FOTB2 …