Issue date: 5/2/08 Section: Features

Media Credit: Courtesy of Columbia Pictures [Click to enlarge]

As a reviewer, I get one ticket so that I can watch a movie I need to review. I received my ticket for "Made of Honor" on Thursday, drove to the theater and sat, by myself, for what was sure to be a quintessential date movie. Of course, not everybody in the theater was on a date, but no dateless person was a man. This is not counting the only manly but embarrassed reviewer of "Made of Honor," me.

"Made of Honor" is about Tom (Patrick Dempsey) - a player, or pick-up artist of sorts - who is best friends with Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), a woman he's known for 10 years and with whom he discovers he's in love while she's on a trip to Scotland. He plans to tell her about his feelings for her when she comes back. However, when she returns, she is engaged to a man she just met on her trip, Colin (Kevin McKidd). She asks her best friend, the unlucky Tom, to be her maid of honor, and he accepts with the plan of convincing her to not marry her fiancé and to instead marry him.

When we watch a date movie, we expect a certain amount of cheese. The hero in a cheesy date movie will nearly always go through a great deal of adversity while trying to win the girl. In the first few minutes, "Made of Honor" seems to stick to this tried and true method: We can easily guess within the first few minutes who will fall in love, and we can expect adversity to occur because it's still early in the film, and adversity creates the drama we enjoy. I'm rather jaded about clichés.

But, as the women around me oohed in empathy with Tom's every hapless situation, I found myself stifling the urge to do the same. That's because the events and characters in "Made of Honor" are so believable and compelling that it's easy to forget you're sitting in a theater. In one scene, when everyone on-screen applauded, I very nearly clapped with them, which only could have heightened my embarrassment, which was palpable.

This believability of the characters and situations helped tremendously with the success of the humor. There was almost no joke that we couldn't laugh at because of the unwelcome thought: "They wouldn't say that." The lines almost always fit. There were a lot of jokes in the movie, and they were usually funny, genuine and worth a good laugh.

One of my biggest apprehensions about this movie was that the antagonist would be an inexplicably evil guy. It happens in so many date movies, and it's annoying. Whenever somebody is just plain evil, it seems absurd and fake because in real life, there is no such thing as just plain evil: There are people who truly believe that they are right and moral in their actions, people who feel guilty and people who are mentally unbalanced and cannot judge morality. There is no evil: There is only misguided or crazy. So when I see pure evil in a movie, my state of being immersed is likely broken.

"Made of Honor" however, does not suffer from this problem. Through the whole movie I was waiting for Colin to reveal himself as the bad guy, but in the end it's almost hard to call him an antagonist at all. Colin is nice, generous, romantic, fun: He's likable. He's just not the right guy for Michelle. I actually really like that Colin is such a good guy because it allows the story to take a much more compelling angle: Nobody is really evil, so we can feel for everybody. "Made of Honor" makes us feel deeply for all sides - emotionally torn in that way - and that is a fairly powerful experience.

"Made of Honor" was worth the watch. There even came a point when I was no longer embarrassed to be surrounded by either dating couples or women who were looking for a sensitive experience. I was just watching a good movie. Of course now I'm just embarrassed to say it.

Jesse Fernandez can be reached at jfernandez@statehornet.com

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools