1998 in Review: "The Wedding Singer"

The rom-com I wasn't ready for

I didn’t date much in high school. Few of my friends did. We were a small class—only 85 students or so—and while we had a great time together, there was never much romantic drama. We were more interested in hanging out than making out. So I remember it being a little weird when a bunch of us went as a co-ed group to see The Wedding Singer on Valentine’s Day weekend during senior year. The boys went because it was an Adam Sandler movie, and we were already deep in our reverence for the burgeoning comic star. Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison were mainstays in our rotation. Why did the girls join us? It didn’t occur to me at that point that girls liked Sandler, too, perhaps for slightly different reasons.  But sensing that this evening had the opportunity to turn romantic, we immediately split up when we entered the theater. The girls sat near the front, and the boys in the back. It was weird. And it felt ever weirder when The Wedding Singer revealed itself to be not another sophomoric Sandler comedy but a rather sweet rom-com with just a few sophomoric touches. I felt like I was in the wrong row at the wrong movie at the wrong time.

It was the right movie for Adam Sandler.

He was 32 the year it came out. How long could he have gone on making low-budget, juvenile comedies? Crow’s feet and boner jokes don’t typically mix. He needed something else. He tried action-comedy with 1997’s Bulletproof. It bombed. The Wedding Singer went much better, even though on paper it was nothing special. Sandler plays Robbie Hart, a singer who falls in love with a waitress (Drew Barrymore, who Sandler would go onto make two more movies with) who happens to be engaged to a douchebag. He keeps his feelings to himself until he learns some ugly truths about her fiancée. In the end, he makes a grand gesture, and wins her heart.

Hardly revolutionary stuff, but surely some of the reason for its success - or at least, what got butts in the seats - was its ‘80s nostalgia. The Wedding Singer was set in 1985, just 13 years before its release, but it might as well have been another century. The New Wave fashion, the hot pink color scheme, the frequent non-sequiturs referencing ‘80s pop culture artifacts like Rubik’s Cubes, Miami Vice, and Van Halen. It was a good marketing hook, but none of that is what makes the film so effective. Nostalgia will put butts in the seats, but it won’t hold your attention for 96 minutes.

Instead, The Wedding Singer succeeds through its smart juxtaposition of story and star. It hangs all of Sandler’s comic eccentricities onto a classic story that wouldn’t feel out of place in the 1930s. Sure, we get Sandler’s trademark fits of rage, but for once they are motivated by actual plot. Consider the film’s signature punchline: “Once again, something that could have been brought to my attention yesterday!” I remember it from the trailer, which sold The Wedding Singer as another rambunctious Sandler comedy. But there’s actually a long, slow, and credible build-up to his outburst. In fact, he says the same line in a near-whisper just a few seconds prior, although you can see the rage starting to bubble beneath the surface even. The point is: It’s not rage just for comedy. It’s rage for character and story.

The same goes for his singing, which is incorporated into the film in ways that feel entirely earned. No avant-garde nursery rhymes about Thanksgiving. Sandler sings six actual songs in The Wedding Singer, each one offering a different shade of humor. In the opening credits, he croons, “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” without a hint of comedy. He does the same with Nat King Cole’s “That’s All” later on, juxtaposed with a scene of Bar Mitzvah guests dancing and grabbing each other’s butts. As his character comes undone under the pressure of his broken engagement, he melts down memorably during versions of “Holiday” and “Love Stinks.” There is a real comic idea in each of these renditions. The same goes for “Somebody Kill Me,” the original song he plays for Julia (Drew Barrymore), which feels closer to the kind of number he might have put on one of his albums but is still deeply rooted in plot. His vacillations between devotion and rage are a result of him having started writing the song before his fiancée left him and finishing it afterwards.

The most surprising of all is “Grow Old With You,” a romantic ode that he sings in an airplane as his version of a Big Speech, a reliable rom-com convention. It contains a few giggles, as he rattles off a list of things that he looks forward to doing with Julia when they are old and married (“even let you hold the remote control”), but mostly it’s just sweet. Almost unbearably sweet, at least for the still-uncomfortable-with-girls guy I was in the winter of 1998. He doesn’t yell or curse in it once. And that’s why it matters. It’s in this moment that Sandler becomes a traditional leading man, and while he would never drift too far away from the dumb comedies that are clearly closest to his heart, this performance allowed us to see him as more than a manchild. It’s hard to imagine he would have ever gotten to make Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish, or Uncut Gems if he hadn’t made The Wedding Singer first.

Good for him, but bad for me, at least at the time. I was mostly annoyed by The Wedding Singer, as it wasn’t the Sandler I had grown to love, but I was probably satiated by the element of the film that has aged the worst: its bullying of its most marginalized characters. Scattered amidst the light, romantic touch are jokes made at the expense of the obese, the ugly, and in one particularly thorny recurring bit, a trans member of Robbie’s band. Whenever George takes over on lead vocals to sing the same Boy George song, the crowd reacts with visible disgust at her presence. Are they responding strictly to her choice of song? Or is it her face? The film leaves just enough ambiguity to let itself off the hook, but either way it’s the same mockery displayed towards the fat guy Robbie makes a cake joke about, the woman with sideburns, and “the mutants over at table 9,” a gaggle of wedding guests Robbie deems unlovable based on their appearance alone. The film fashions itself as being in solidarity with the marginalized—Robbie lumps himself in with them as equally unlovable—but it uses them as a punchline, and it never extends such mockery to Robbie or Julie or any of its central characters. None of the movie stars are ever in doubt of being lovable. This bullying is an odd fit in an otherwise sweet and tender film.

But that’s the balance Sandler was trying to achieve, and it’s fairly clear that it worked. The Wedding Singer was Sandler’s first unqualified smash, grossing $123 million worldwide. How did it manage that? The same way it got me and my female friends into the theater that Valentine’s Day weekend. By offering classic romance and juvenile Sandleria in perfect balance. Something for both the teenage girls and the dumb boys too stupid to try to date them. Twenty-five years later, my wife and I watch it once a year or so. At least now, I sit in the same row as the girl.