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  Film: My Big Fat Greek Wedding October 20, 2002 Reporter : Peter Thompson Peter's Verdict: Director: Joel Zwick Genre: Romantic Comedy. Video: broadband  Well, what a success story! It’s strange and wonderful the way these things happen. My Big Fat Greek Wedding arrived at the right time for Americans battered by bad news and it’s deeply reassuring for all kinds of reasons. It’s about Greek Americans so it confirms the overriding ideal of the United States as the world’s great cultural melting pot. It’s about arguably the most profound of all our public rituals – marriage. And it demonstrates that, for most of us, security and love are found in the bosom of that most primitive institution – the family.Toula Portokalos (played by Nia Vardalos) is her family’s despair. Much as they love her, her parents Gus and Maria can’t understand why, at 30, Toula is still unmarried. She works hard in the family’s Chicago restaurant, Dancing Zorba’s, but she looks as if she doesn’t care. Worst of all, she refuses her father’s help in finding a husband… If her parents are worried, the world looks even bleaker to Toula. All around her, the family bubbles with ceaseless, ebullient energy. Her crazy cousin Nikki – Gia Carides under all that hair – does whatever she likes. Her fertile sister Athena sweeps through, ordering everyone about and basking in her parent’s pride. Only Toula seems to have missed the bus…  Which, of course, isn’t true, especially in romantic comedies. One day, a tall, good-looking WASP-ish young man called Ian Miller (John Corbett) appears. It’s love at first sight for both of them although they barely realize it.But Toula has other things on her mind. She has to become her own person and undo thirty years of conditioning. Gathering all her courage, she suggests to her father that they get a computer for the business … And this introduces another major theme of the film. One of the lessons Toula still has to learn is that things are not always what they seem and that there are different kinds of strength… INTERVIEW NIA VARDALOS: "I think that we’re looking at a whole era where men can admit that they’re sensitive, I think that it’s OK for men to admit that they’re not completely in control and that doesn’t make them less of a man. What I tried to show in the film with the father is that he doesn’t have control, even though he does but in the end – I don’t want to give away the ending of the film – in the end he steps up to the plate and is more of a man than he ever was."  Most of us think we have stories that would make great movies but Nia Vardalos did more than think about it. After many years working for the famous comedy troupe “Second City”, she started her own one-woman stage show, based on her family. But the screenplay she wrote was rejected by everyone until Rita Wilson heard about her…INTERVIEW NIA VARDALOS: "Rita Wilson is Greek and she came to the show and she said, this should be a movie and I handed her the screenplay, she sent her husband Tom Hanks to the show, he called me up and he said we’re going to make your movie and you’re going to play the lead role." Sounds like a dream come true. But, the film had many hurdles to jump, just like the affair between Toula and Ian…  And the blanket opposition of the Portokalos family to Toula’s romance was mirrored by the resistance Nia Vardalos herself found when she tried to make headway in her chosen career…INTERVIEW NIA VARDALOS: "I think agents in general and maybe the Hollywood film community tries to compartmentalize people. If you’re a 22-year-old thin blonde they know exactly how to cast you, if you’re a 42-year-old curly-haired Hispanic woman, they know exactly how to cast you. But when you’re in the middle thirties and Greek, they just didn’t know what to do with me. So rather than wait for someone to figure it out, I figured it out for them." PETER THOMPSON: The things that really work are the things that nobody’s done before…?  NIA VARDALOS : "Exactly. When I was first approached by Hollywood film producers, not Rita and Tom, other film producers, they said you know we’re going to make this into a Hispanic wedding movie or, and I said well, why don’t you want to keep it Greek and the guy went, OK how about Italian, we know Italian wedding movies work! And I said, how about Greek, don’t you want to do something new? And the guy was like new? (laughs) like that’s not what Hollywood does. And the irony is that look at this brand new idea and the world is just embracing it. Yay!"By staying true to herself, Nia Vardalos has created a story that has proved to be accessible to an impressively wide cross-section of the movie-going public. In many ways it mirrors her own journey and it’s drawn freely from her personal history. Like Toula, Nia fell in love with a non-Greek called Ian who chose to be baptized so that he could marry her… INTERVIEW NIA VARDALOS: "The real Ian is an only child of only child parents and when he comes over, I remember we were in Chicago one time at my cousin’s house and we were watching a football game and there were at least three cousins named Nick leaning on him, sweating, watching the ball game going ‘hey Ian, pass the Cheetos’ and I just looked at this guy, this only child and thought, what is it about this family that he loves so much? And he said it best, he said, your family loves me to the point of suffocation."  I don’t know how much significance we should place on the fact that two of the year’s best, most successful films, both made by women, have revolved around the marriage of different cultures. But like Bend It Like Beckham, My Big Fat Greek Wedding goes beyond the obvious, sentimental appeal of the love story. It shines a light on the very real potential for people to find their way through the maze of problems that separate us from each other. Obviously, both films have struck a deep and timely chord in a world badly in need of solutions. |
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