Robert Altman’s A WEDDING is high second-tier on my personal list of favorite movies. It’s about just that, a comedy-drama about two dozen characters interacting at an elaborate but scandal-prone wedding, in which we learn more than we ever wanted to know about the pathologies of everybody involved.
It stars Carol Burnett, but really, the cast is huge. Lillian Gish came out of retirement to play the family matriarch.
I am in awe, in particular, about what you learn of the groom’s father, an immigrant who had to completely forsake his own family, by contract, in order to marry into this wealthy and largely awful clan. The groom’s mother is a junkie who employs a kept doctor, played by Howard Duff, to keep her stoned to near-catatonia. And so on.
Anyway. One of the subsidiary characters is played by Mia Farrow, who is here the clearly disturbed sister of the bride, a girl who never speaks at any point except to utter one word, her only word in the whole movie, which is timed to make the room erupt in horror.
Farrow is brilliant in the almost-wordless role.
But it’s the character I’m thinking of. She is a terrible person. She is a disturbed person. We see in glimpses that she hates herself and everybody around her, and that her vague smile, which she wears constantly, only puts a pleasant face on a soul that is really only interested in being the center of attention.
At one point, when she achieves the notoriety she seeks, and everybody is swooning with scandalized horror, when the room around her has erupted with weeping and carrying on, she beams with delight.
Delight.
At having brought scandal to the party. Which is now fully about her. Which is what she wanted.
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