“When you meet the right person, you go the distance. And let me tell you about the distance: everybody changes. But if you’re with the right person, and they change; you meet the right person all over again.”
Jenny Farrell (Katherine Heigl) and her immediate family are brought together for a baptism, and Jenny learns that her family are still completely obsessed with when she will be getting married. Seeing the family together again, including her brother Michael (Matthew Metzger) and sister Anne (Grace Gummer) who are both married, make Jenny realise that she does want to get married and have a family. This leads Jenny to finally reveal to her conservative suburban family that she is a lesbian and has been in a relationship for five years with a woman called Kitty (Alexis Bledel).
Jenny’s Wedding (2015) is about Jenny’s parents Eddie (Tom Wilkinson) and Rose (Linda Emond) coming to terms with the fact that their daughter is gay. They portray a realistic situation in which they believe they did something wrong to cause Jenny to be like this, they worry what the neighbours will think and tell Jenny she should keep it a secret. Whilst it would have been nice to see more of a spotlight on Jenny and Kitty’s relationship, the film is not about that; it aims to inform people about the reality of coming out to a traditional family.
Katherine Heigl is an arguably mediocre actress who is known for her roles in various successful romantic comedies, such as Knocked Up (2007), 27 Dresses (2008) and The Ugly Truth (2009). One thing Heigl does not lack is her passion for acting and telling stories. While Jenny’s Wedding’s post-production costwas funded by an Indiegogo campaign, Heigl of course played the lead role which was a nice switch on her typical straight-centred rom-coms.
Heigl shines in the film as her character builds up the courage, thanks to her dad, to come out and she does not fail to stand up for herself and her right to be happy and have what everyone else has. This includes her wish for her father to give her away during the wedding like he did for her sister, which he declines at first. Heigl emits a true passion as Jenny, as she screams “I used to care so much about what the two of you thought but not anymore, why would I?” when her parents find her sexuality difficult to accept. She also expresses her concern about how her parents asked her to lie about who she is just to protect them: “How dare you talk to me about meeting the right person. Do you know who you meet every time you and mum change? The same couple of lying cowards!”
The film follows a simple plot: Jenny tells her parents she is gay, they react poorly and argue and then they accept Jenny for who she is in the end. What is good about this is it’s not overly complicated, a lesbian does not die nad there is actually a happy ending. In addition to this, the film touches on some other important issues with acceptance. Anne expresses that she feels lied to because Jenny did not tell her the truth for all of these years, even though it’s people like Anne and her family who build the closet for people like Jenny to stay in. Thankfully, the “lie” is the only problem Anne has a problem with. Whilst she has everything Jenny wants – a marriage and children – Anne sees how happy Jenny is with Kitty. She moans to her husband Frankie about how the grass is always dead, and sees that her parents don’t have dead grass and neither would Jenny. “Happy people do NOT have dead grass.”
Overall, Jenny’s Wedding does exactly what the writer and director Mary Agnes Donoghue aimed for it to do; it tells a difficult yet touching story that focuses on how difficult it can be for a traditional family to accept that their daughter is gay, shows their negative behaviour including wanting Jenny to lie to protect them and not her but thankfully accepting Jenny in the end as they realise she is still the same person regardless of who she loves.
★★★
Leave a Reply