Marry Me
Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson team up for a smart, funny gift to the St Valentine’s Day weekend – and to diehard romantics everywhere.
The song remains the same: Sarah Silverman, Chloe Coleman, Owen Wilson and a complete stranger.
Let’s get one thing straight. Kat Coiro's Marry Me is a mainstream romantic comedy designed to touch and amuse as large an audience as possible. The fact that it succeeds with heart and verve should be celebrated. The script, adapted from Bobby Crosby's graphic novel, has taken an audacious premise and run with it. To power the mechanism of the conceit, Jennifer Lopez – who also produces – plays a variation of herself, a thrice-married Latino singing superstar whose every second is covered and monitored – and commented on – on-line in real time. She is Kat Valdez, a beautiful, talented superstar sustained by a retinue of flattering enablers. In direct contrast, Charlie Gilbert (Owen Wilson) is a divorced maths teacher with a geriatric bulldog and a twelve-year-old daughter who no longer thinks he’s ‘cool’. But remember, dear reader, opposites can attract…
The set-up of Marry Me is so ludicrous as to be laughable, but then much of what happens in the media circus is frequently as insane. Kat and her fiancé Bastian (the Colombian singer Maluma) have duetted on a new single, ‘Marry Me’, which has become a massive hit and is to be the centrepiece of a televised, live-streamed wedding, the musical marital media event of the century. Charlie’s daughter Lou (Chloe Coleman) is a fan of Kat and has fashioned a placard with the title of her favourite song (‘Marry Me’) and, by sheer coincidence, she, Charlie and Charlie’s colleague Parker Debbs (Sarah Silverman) end up at the concert. Then, just before the on-stage vow-taking, Kat discovers that a video of Bastian’s infidelity has gone viral…
Following the blueprint of Notting Hill (and, to a lesser extent, Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born), Marry Me has much to live up to, but brings its own sense of potty reality into a world of celebrity that is now governed by the Internet. Drawing on JLo’s public and private persona (she, too, has been married and divorced three times), the film not only knows it audience but also the exposed scaffold inhabited by the instantly famous. Any romcom benefits from the presence of Owen Wilson, who is not only very funny but relatable, while his semblance to a battered young(ish) Robert Redford can still set female hearts aflutter. His Charlie is described as smart, cute and nice, so he’s a pretty good match. And fans of JLo can hardly be disappointed as she sings a whole bunch of show-stoppers and, again, proves that she is a proficient actress. As with all good romcoms, there’s reliable support, in this instance from John Bradley, Sarah Silverman and Chloe Coleman, rounding out a feel-good entertainment that should stand the test of time. The film’s catchphrase might even catch on: “If you sit in the question long enough, the answer will find you.”
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, Maluma, John Bradley, Chloe Coleman, Sarah Silverman, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Michelle Buteau, Kat Cunning, Taliyah Whitaker, Diego Lucano, Kara Green, Jimmy Fallon.
Dir Kat Coiro, Pro Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, Jennifer Lopez, Benny Medina and John Rogers, Screenplay John Rogers, Tami Sagher and Harper Dill, Ph Florian Ballhaus, Pro Des Jane Musky, Ed Michael Berenbaum and Peter Teschner, Music John Debney, Costumes Caroline Duncan and Diras Guillart.
Nuyorican Productions/Perfect World Pictures/Kung Fu Monkey Productions/Belle Hope Productions-Universal Pictures.
112 mins. USA. 2022. UK and US Rel: 11 February 2022. Cert. 12A.
