Marry Me movie review: One can’t help but feel that this is the entirety of Jennifer Lopez’s life that you are seeing on screen, as undoubtedly director Kat Coiro wants you to.
This is one of those movies in which super-successful people with lots of money and no real love, fall for super-ordinary people with lots of love and no real money. The premise that sets it up is as bizarre as it gets, where the bride realises just before her wedding-cum-rock concert, to be beamed live to her 20 million fans, that the groom has been cheating on her. So she picks the one person she can spot from the crowd, and guess who he turns out to be? A math schoolteacher, with a precocious 12-year-old daughter, a dog, and the shaggy hair and crooked nose of Owen Wilson.
Really, there are few people who scream disarmingly harmless more than Wilson, and true to form, his Charlie slips unquestioningly into the incongruous role of Kat Valdez’s (Lopez) stand-in groom, with the arrangement that the wedding continue just as long as the social media storm blows over.
We all know where this is going, with or without social media – which is as much the oxygen as the punching bag of this story. Not that the film believes in landing many blows, with life just a series of happy episodes from the recording studio to a school where apparently rockstars can walk in and out at will, filled with pre-teens who easily jam both to maths and music, and with no friction that can’t be sung away by Lopez’s lusty vocals.
However, for brief moments here and there, director Kat Coiro does break away from what you are expecting. Like when Kat is actually leaning into her persona that defines who she is, from her hair extensions to the thermos with glitter that her assistant carries for her – rather than being apologetic about her success and the life she has earned. Or like when, in a reversal of genders, it’s Kat who organises this grand Coney Island dream date for Charlie’s birthday – you know, where she takes his blindfold off and on come the lights of the giant wheel.
One can’t help but feel that this is the entirety of Lopez’s life that you are seeing on screen, as undoubtedly Coiro (with the nominated TV series Dead to Me to her credit) wants you to. An actor with unmistakable charisma, who is very good at what she does, only that whatever she does is never good enough. And who has a love life that was first fuel to her fame and then fodder to it.
Like Kat says in the film, it’s not about how good you are, but “credibility”. “I have never even been nominated for a Grammy, you know.”
Source: IndianExpress
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