Apparently it wasn't just the man-on-pie sex that made the American Pie movies work. Erik Pepple says American Wedding proves that.
American Wedding
Rated: R
Starring: Jason Biggs, Alyson Hannigan, Seann William Scott and Eugene Levy
Directed by: Jesse Dylan
101 minutes
GRADE: B+
By Erik Pepple
210 west Pop Culture Editor [send email]
The success of the American Pie series is not found in the pie fucking, the dick jokes or the masturbation jokes -- although those all help. Pie’s enormous success is rooted in something simpler -- there’s a sweetness and genuine warmth amid the body fluids. It takes legitimate skill to make a movie where shit-eating gags are effortlessly enmeshed with a love story.
American Wedding picks up three years after American Pie 2, with the perpetually sexually hapless Jim (Jason Biggs) engaged to his flute-loving girlfriend, Michelle (the gifted comedian, Alyson Hannigan). That’s pretty much it as far as the plot goes, and the rest of the movie revolves around the complications of meeting the in-laws, participating in gay dance-offs and the foibles of hosting a bachelor party with a German dominatrix. It is a rickety clothesline for jokes, but the strengths of the Pie series have never been their plots, it’s been their characters.
At their heart, the Pie pictures have a generosity toward their characters that is sorely lacking in most sex farces. For all the fumbling and coarse humor, it’s never mean-spirited. The writers and cast understand the necessary context for pulling off jokes that straddle the line between offensive and harmless fun. In Wedding, that is best demonstrated in a sequence where Seann William Scott’s Belushi-inspired Stifler must participate in a dance-off at gay bar. What could have turned into homophobic fodder is instead turned inside out into a joke about Stifler’s overriding egotism and fascination with anything that will get him off.
Like the rest of the series, the best moments in American Wedding come courtesy of Eugene Levy as Jim’s well-meaning father. In many ways, the crux of these pictures has been the relationship between Jim and his dad. Levy and Biggs have an easy comic repartee rooted equally in affection and discomfort. Between the Pie movies and Christopher Guest’s films, Levy is on a winning streak unparalleled by any contemporary comic actor, and Wedding gives him many opportunities to keep the streak alive. Levy is adept at combining the serious and absurd like few others. As for Biggs, he continues to be an underrated comedian. He plays Jim as a befuddled cross between Annie Hall-era Woody Allen and The Graduate’s Ben Braddock.
American Wedding has its dead spots, specifically the scenes involving the bachelor party. Thanks to director Jesse Dylan’s (Bob’s son who isn’t in The Wallflowers) lazy and awkward staging the actors are forced to work extra hard at making the swinging-door sex farce aspects work, but with the scene edited as loosely and sloppily as possible, it doesn’t quite work. It’s a testament to the cast (especially the invaluable Fred Willard) that the sequence almost works.
Regardless, Dylan’s sometimes clumsy direction ends up being not much of a distraction. He realizes that this is not a director’s franchise, so for the most part his work is clean and uncluttered, letting the skill of his ensemble deliver the jokes.
As the third film in a series that began inauspiciously as an exceedingly smart teen sex comedy, American Wedding is surprisingly successful. It is a bittersweet, raunchy comedy that nicely closes the book on this most unlikely of trilogies.
I loved the dance-off!