Are you with the bride or the groom? Hold on, scratch that. Are you with Reese Witherspoon or Will Ferrell?
“You’re Cordially Invited,” a new comedy directed by Nicholas Stoller, brings together two stars whose movie worlds are nearly as divided as wedding guests on separate sides of the aisle. Ferrell is most closely associated with broad comedies and Witherspoon the more romantic variety. And while both have expanded beyond their wheelhouses, they are each A-list refugees from movie genres — laugh-out-loud comedies, rom-coms — that have largely faded from theaters in recent years.
“You’re Cordially Invited,” which debuts Thursday on Prime Video, unites these two once-ubiquitous box-office forces in a streaming-only wedding comedy that cross-pollinates “Father of the Bride” with “Wedding Crashers.” The combination works well enough, though it’d be fairer to deem “You’re Cordially Invited” a funnier-than-average wedding movie than it would be a top-grade Ferrell comedy.
It’s been two decades since, in “Wedding Crashers,” Ferrell so gently called to his mother, “Hey, Mom! Can we get some meatloaf!” But a whole era has passed. “You’re Cordially Invited” is an attempt to rekindle some of the spirit of those early ’00s comedies while growing it up a little, and roping in a new generation of funny people. Here, Ferrell plays the overly doting father to Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan). He’s a widower whose happiness rests to an unsound degree on his daughter. Jim steams her clothes and styles her hair. He’s not crashing the wedding this time; he’s baking the cake.
When Jenni returns home with a ring on her finger and her now-fiancé (Stony Blyden) in tow, Jim experiences the happy news more like a nightmare. Still, he gathers himself together and books a destination wedding on the small Georgia island where he and his wife were married.
Meanwhile, we’re introduced to Margot (Witherspoon) a high-powered reality TV executive in Los Angeles whose younger sister (Meredith Hagner) is getting married to her boyfriend (Jimmy Tatro). Her abiding issue is a disconnect with her Atlanta-era family and their disapproving mother (Celia Weston), a fissure that the wedding, which Margot opts to plan herself, quickly exacerbates.
When, a year later, these two groups arrive on the island, Jim and Margot eye each other suspiciously right up until they each attempt to check in at the same time. Thanks to the untimely death of the inn’s longtime owner, the place has been double-booked for the weekend — a particularly awkward situation given the island can only accommodate one wedding at a time. The supporting roles throughout “You’re Cordially Invited” are well cast, including the inn’s new, very apologetic manager, played by Jack McBrayer.
After some hesitation, Margot and Jim resolve to share the venue. This, of course, is the not particularly subtle concept of “You’re Cordially Invited.” The arrangement is momentarily copacetic but gradually devolves into an all-out war between Margot and Jim, while the two very different wedding parties — one a multicultural DJ-ing crew, the other longtime Southerners — mingle congenially.
The main deficiency of “You’re Cordially Invited,” also scripted by Stoller (“Neighbors,” “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”), is that everything about it proceeds from its concept. The characters feel engineered to suit it, and everything in its plot is orchestrated to serve the rival wedding feud. Nothing in how things evolve will surprise you or feel particularly organic. For a not especially long movie, “You’re Cordially Invited” drags, a byproduct of its artificial conception. This is the kind of film where the post-credits sing-along feels forced.
That said, there’s a wide array of comic talent throughout Stoller’s film that enlivens it. That includes Keyla Monterroso Mejia, Rory Scovel, Leanne Morgan and even, briefly, Peyton Manning. This should be a showcase for Viswanathan, the talented star of “Blockers” and “Bad Education,” but her character, while primary, doesn’t give her much to work with beyond shedding an overly dependent dad. The highlight of the cast, really, is Weston, who is so good as a hard-to-impress matriarch that you could just as easily drop her into a family drama.
Ferrell, who has made unadjusted fathers a specialty since “Saturday Night Live,” finds more ways to make Jim a compelling comic character than most anyone could. Having the chance to see him in a big studio comedy has gotten so foolishly infrequent that “You’re Cordially Invited” is worth RSVP’ing to for that too-rare opportunity, in itself.
Somewhat surprisingly, “You’re Cordially Invited” doesn’t culminate in a big comic set piece but puts much — maybe too much — of its energy into talking through Jim and Margot’s hang-ups. There’s a clever, self-aware theme of honesty: too little of it in Jim and Jenni’s performative dynamic, and too much of it in Margot’s cynical family relationships. That all of this hangs together is a testament, most of all, to Witherspoon deftness as a performer. In a movie in which Ferrell wrestles an alligator and Nick Jonas cameos (winningly) as a singing pastor, you don’t doubt Witherspoon for a moment.
“You’re Cordially Invited,” an Amazon MGM Studios release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “language throughout and some sexual references.” Running time: 109 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
