9 / 10
Official trailer
Destination Wedding is fantastic, and it’s the last thing I’d have expected to enjoy. It’s two people talking. That’s the film. No subplots, no supporting performances, no crowd-pleasing set pieces, just Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder insulting each other in California wine country. Victor Levin wrote and directed it. Reeves plays Frank, Ryder plays Lindsay, and every other character in the film is a body in the background who never says a word. The two leads share nearly every frame. It runs eighty-seven minutes and it’s a 9. It drags a little in places, and I didn’t care, because the script is so much sharper than anything else in the genre.
The Setup
Frank and Lindsay meet at an airport gate on their way to the same wedding in Paso Robles. He’s the groom’s estranged half-brother. She’s the groom’s ex-fiancée, invited by mistake or by cruelty, depending on who you ask.
Neither of them wants to be there. Both of them know nobody will be pleased to see them. They loathe each other on sight, and then discover they’ve been seated together at every event of the weekend. From there it’s a series of conversations: at the gate, in the rental car, at the rehearsal dinner, on a hillside, at the reception. The wedding happens somewhere off to the side, and that’s the joke.
Two People, No Extras
Levin’s formal trick is that nobody else speaks. The bride and groom, the parents, the guests and the staff all move through the frame in silence. It sounds like a stunt and it plays like a point of view: these two are so wrapped up in themselves that nobody else exists for them.
It also puts everything on the dialogue. There’s no cutaway to a funny best man, no montage, no second couple to carry a subplot. If the writing goes slack for a minute, the film dies. It mostly doesn’t. The script is dense, fast and mean, closer to a stage two-hander than to a studio romantic comedy, and it trusts the audience to keep up. I like being trusted like that. Most romantic comedies explain every joke twice, and this one fires them off and moves on whether you caught them or not.
For Writers
Levin strips out every supporting voice and forces his film to survive on two characters talking. Removing your safety nets exposes whether the core of a story can hold it up. When you write, try a chapter with only two characters, no interruptions and nothing for them to do but talk, and see whether your dialogue holds. If it doesn’t, the problem is that your characters don’t want different enough things from each other in that room. Two people who agree have nothing to say.
Reeves and Ryder
Reeves plays Frank as a man who has decided in advance that everything is bad and is pleased whenever he’s proven right. It’s the driest work he’s ever done, and it’s very funny. I didn’t expect this kind of deadpan timing from him, and I’d gladly watch him sulk through another eighty-seven minutes. Ryder matches him. Lindsay is angrier, more wounded and quicker, and the two of them have the easy timing you’d expect from actors who first worked together on Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992 and have been paired several times since.
What makes the pairing work is that neither performance asks for sympathy. They’re both awful. They know they’re awful. The film never softens them into people we’re supposed to root for, and the romance sneaks up anyway.
The Dialogue
The script is the film’s reason for existing. The exchanges are long, literate, and full of the kind of lines most romantic comedies wouldn’t attempt: on family, disappointment, marriage as an institution and the misery of being seated at the wrong table.
It’s misanthropic without being lazy about it. Frank and Lindsay have thought their pessimism through, so their arguments have substance instead of being a mood. Some viewers find it insufferable, and the complaints are usually about the same thing I liked: two unpleasant people talking at length in complete sentences. If that sounds unbearable, don’t start it.
Paso Robles
The film was shot in California wine country, and the setting does more work than it gets credit for. Everything around Frank and Lindsay is beautiful, expensive and staged for photographs, and their misery is funnier for it. There’s a particular kind of destination wedding that exists to be documented, where the guests are unpaid extras in somebody else’s production. The film understands that exactly, and it puts two people who refuse the role at the center of it. The visual style stays plain. Long takes, wide shots, no fussy camera work, so the actors can carry scenes at full length. It looks like a stage set with vineyards.
For Writers
The gorgeous, carefully staged setting is the joke: two miserable people in the middle of somebody else’s perfect photograph. Setting can argue with your characters instead of supporting them. When you write a scene, try placing your character in the environment least suited to their mood and let the contrast make the point. Take your bleakest chapter and move it somewhere bright, crowded and celebratory. The gap between the room and the character usually says more than either alone.
Where It Drags
The middle sags. There’s a stretch around the rehearsal dinner and the hillside walk where the film stops finding new angles on the same two positions, and you can feel the eighty-seven minutes.
The mountain lion sequence is the film’s one concession to plot, and it’s the weakest thing in it. It’s a physical event in a film built entirely on talk, and it sits oddly. I’d have cut it and let the two of them keep arguing on that hillside. None of that cost the film much for me. A slow patch in a film this sharp is a small price.
The pacing complaint is also partly the format. Eighty-seven minutes of two people arguing is about as long as the form can hold, and Levin pushes right up against the limit instead of past it.
For Writers
The movie sags exactly where its two characters stop wanting new things from each other and start repeating their positions. Dialogue stalls when the underlying negotiation stops moving. When you write a long conversation, track what each person is trying to get at every stage, and end the scene when the want stops changing. Take your longest scene and mark the point where the goals stop shifting. Cut from there to the next moment where something is at stake. Readers forgive a short scene. They don’t forgive a circular one.
The Ending
They sleep together, argue about it, sleep together again, and fail completely to become nicer people. The film’s idea of a happy ending is two pessimists deciding to be pessimistic in the same place.
The last exchange is as dry as everything before it. There’s no speech, no airport dash, no change of heart. They simply stop pretending they’d rather be alone.
That’s the reason it works. A romantic comedy that fixed these two would have been a lie, and Levin knows better than to try. I adore this ending. Two people agreeing to be miserable together is the most romantic idea in the film, and I believe it more than any big declaration the genre usually closes on.
Craft Note
Craft Note
It’s a two-hander with no supporting cast, no score to lean on and no plot to hide behind, and it survives on the strength of its dialogue alone. If you can write two people who want different things and can’t leave the room, you can write anything. Strip a scene down to that and find out whether your talk is as strong as you think it is.
Is Destination Wedding worth watching?
Yes, if you like talk. It’s a sharp, sour, very funny film about two people nobody else wants around, and Reeves and Ryder are both excellent. There’s a slow stretch in the middle and one badly judged mountain lion.
I don’t normally enjoy this kind of movie and I loved it start to finish. That’s why it’s a 9.
