Saturday, January 28, 2023

O mpampas tis nyfis

There was a free preview weekend over Thanksgiving, and that gave me the chance to record a movie that's already 20 years old, but that I hadn't seen before despite its great box office success: My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Nia Vardalos, who wrote the material basing it on her own life as the daughter of Greek immigrants to Canada, stars as Toula Portokalos, a 30-year-old single woman living with her Greek family in the Chicago area. Her father Gus (Michael Constantine) emigrated from Greece, and built up the family by opening a Greek restaurant and having all the children work in the restaurant. Aunt Voula (Andrea Martin) runs a travel agency specializing in tours of Greece, and the family as a whole is steeped in all things Greek. Dad is extremely proud of his Greek heritage, to the point that he tells Toula a Greek woman is supposed to marry a Greek man, produce a lot of Greek children, and cook Greek food for the family.

Toula, unsurprisingly, chafes at a lot of this. It doesn't help that she looks relatively plain. Other kids teased her for her Greek heritage when she was a kid, and she had to go to Greek school to learn the language when other kids got to do more normal things like join the Girl Scouts. The movie being set in the era when personal computers were beginning to get used in small businesses in a big way, Toula decides to go to night school to learn business computing.

While downtown, she runs into Ian Miller (John Corbett), a nice youngish man who had been a customer at the restaurant some time back. It takes Ian a little bit of time to recognize Toula, because she's changed her appearance by getting contacts and a more suitable hairdo, much like Richard Basehart in Tension. But Ian, having met Toula again, is immediately smitten with her, in part because she's just so different.

There is, of course, a serious problem. Gus wants Toula to marry a Greek man. Needless to say, he finds out about the relationship with Ian, in part because the Portokalos family is so big that you can't get away from one or another cousin spotting you somewhere. Dad is horrified by it, and tries to put his foot down. But Ian is so in love with Toula that he's even willing to convert to Greek Orthodox, even though he doesn't quite know yet just how ebullient Toula's family is.

And then there's the problem of Ian's parents. They're nice enough people, but they're not Greek either, and the sort of people who seem to prefer a quieter, relatively conservative life. The meeting between the two sets of parents isn't helped by the fact that Gus and Toula's mom Maria (Lainie Kazan) get the brilliant idea of inviting the whole family to the meeting and making a big party out of it.

You can probably guess that love does eventually win out since, after all, the movie is titled My Big Fat Greek Wedding and you have to expect there to be, well, a wedding in the proceedings. And both sides of the family learn to respect each other.

For fairly obvious reasons, as I was watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding I couldn't help but think of Father of the Bride. Pretty much everybody has been through multiple weddings from multiple perspectives, and much of the anxiety over the preparation is universal, with the only difference here being that the movie has a specifically Greek immigrant perspective. But the universality comes through in spades, and the Portokalos family is decidedly real, if exaggerated at times for comic effect.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a wonderful little movie, and the sort of thing that's almost guaranteed to lift your spirits. Who couldn't help but love the Portokaloses' zest for life?

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