Cringe comedy misses its mark
Table 19 (M, 87 mins), Directed by Jeffrey Blitz, ★★1⁄2
Eight years in the making, this wedding set dramedy feels like it has been left on the shelf a little too long.
Like Mr Right, The Last Five Years and Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, Jeffrey Blitz’s tale is a showcase for the multitalented Anna Kendrick, but despite its attempts to subvert rom-com tropes it leaves the viewer feeling mostly unsatisfied.
Eloise (Kendrick) was destined to be the maid of honour at her oldest friend’s wedding until her two-year relationship with the best man (Wyatt Russell), the bride’s brother, ended badly.
Now, despite planning half the nuptials, she’s been banished to the titular Table 19 – the one nearest the bathrooms.
Joining her in a ‘‘sextet of the shunned’’ are the bride’s first nanny, a disgraced cousin, a couple who own a diner and a young man whose mother is an old family friend. Between the pigs-ina-blanket hors d’oeuvres to the cutting of the cake, these six will learn far more about one another than they ever expected.
While Blitz (Spellbound, The Office US) and co-writers Jay and Mark Duplass (Togetherness, Cyrus) do a nice job of capturing the banal and painful small-talk that often takes place where disparate people are thrown together, the narrative twists and turns feel forced and stagey.
Revelations, subplots and past traumas are terribly telegraphed, picked up and then discarded, with the film’s (actually thankfully) slim running time not helping in fleshing out these mostly onedimensional characters.
It’s a cringe comedy with too many dislikeable protagonists, a bittersweet tale that’s a little too sour and one with pathos that’s undercut by an overabundance of pratfalls. A cinematic invitation you should accept with caution. – James Croot