Rom-Com You’re Cordially Invited Is a Much Better Com Than Rom

Even though the moment was inevitable, I winced when Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon finally locked lips in You’re Cordially Invited. The nuptial movie from writer-director Nicholas Stoller represents the stars’ first team-up, though the revelation that they’ve never worked together before is more of a “yeah, that makes sense” fact than a “how is that possible” one. Ferrell is King Galumph, best at working on a broad scale as genial doofuses, heroic fools, and oblivious bloviators, while Witherspoon’s a diminutive spitfire whose characters insist on a more grounded context for their (deserved or ruthless) triumphs over their doubters. They’re both wildly gifted funny people, but they don’t frequent the same planes of comedy, and in You’re Cordially Invited (streaming on Amazon Prime), they’re less co-stars than the leads of two movies that occasionally intersect. It’s unfortunate that the plot turn welding those two pictures together requires their stars to do impressions of people who are attracted to one another. They’re not drawn together, but the opposite — like magnets whose poles are aligned, their energy is such that they seem like they should repel one another whenever close. That cursory kiss isn’t just lacking all conviction, it feels like it should result in the actors rebounding violently toward opposite sides of the screen.

Thankfully, the romantic aspects of You’re Cordially Invited are deployed sparingly and mostly toward the end, as though Margot, the reality-TV executive played by Witherspoon, and Jim, the widowed father played by Ferrell, only get together because they’re single and it’s last call (no judgment, relationships have started from less). Stoller built his career on what I think of as com-roms — movies, from Forgetting Sarah Marshall to The Five-Year Engagement to Bros, that foreground the laughs and riff on the expected rhythms of the romantic comedy while nevertheless finding their way to a heartfelt finale. You’re Cordially Invited might have been better off ditching the rom of it all entirely, but Stoller is good enough at this that even if the rest of his movie consists of two slightly discordant halves, both are pretty solid. Ferrell’s fraction is a father-daughter lark about a disturbingly devoted parent shaken by the prospect of his only child leaving him for a life of her own with the college boyfriend she’s rushing to wed. Witherspoon’s is a family reunion dramedy about a successful career woman who regresses to a defensive teenager in the company of the buttoned-down Atlanta kin she’s mostly estranged from.

When a reservation mishap leads to Jim’s daughter, Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan), and Margot’s sister, Neve (Meredith Hagner), being double-booked to marry at the same small island inn over the same weekend, Jim and Margot channel their anxieties into what escalates into a nuptial war. I was expecting You’re Cordially Invited to be better with Jim, who’s another of the good-natured, emotionally eruptive men that Stoller’s populated so many of his movies with, but it’s actually Margot and her family who come into sharper focus. The L.A.-based Margot sees herself as a refugee from a culture of snobbery and conservatism, with Neve as her only ally among a group of people who judge her for making different choices. And yet, the more we get to see her dynamic with her loved one, especially her razor-blades-dipped-in-honey mother (Celia Weston), the less clear it is who pushed who away. Margot’s family members may keep secrets and like to tuck criticisms into mild observations, but Margot’s embrace of radical honesty, which gets linked to her work in ways I wish we saw more of, is in certain lights just another, more direct form of being mean.

Margot’s straight-laced family, enforcers of white southern respectability, are funnier than the rival wedding party, mostly because they’re allowed to be more specific, while Jenni, her DJing fiancé, and their friends and loved ones end up feeling defined by the contrast they provide, as a multiracial, rambunctious, White Claw and cornhole loving crew. That said, Keyla Monterroso Mejia, who a few weeks ago played a scene-stealing payday loan officer in One of Them Days, is once again a standout as Jenni’s overly protective, hard-partying maid of honor. But You’re Cordially Invited is overstuffed with funny people — Jimmy Tatro, as Neve’s Rascal Flatts–loving Chippendale dancer of a groom, basically serves as the Chekhov’s gun of stripping — to the point where I wished the film could be pared down just so that it could spend a little more time with these characters, the wonderful throwaway details the script crams in, and the brilliant bits of line delivery its cast is effortlessly capable of. (I can’t get over the way Weston intones that “the sins of the country are blamed on the South.”) You’re Cordially Invited is just much better moment to moment than it is when it needs to move the plot along, to the point where a plot development involving a suspected infidelity makes no sense aside from the story requiring conflict to reach its final act. The eventual Ferrell-Witherspoon pairing-up feels just as mechanical, like the movie can’t escape the boundaries of its chosen genre, even if those boundaries are self-assigned.