REVIEW: Made of Honor

By Kyle Brazzel

Tom (Patrick Dempsey) agrees to be in the wedding of his friend Hannah (Michelle Monaghan) in Made of Honor.

LITTLE ROCK — Patrick Dempsey might be Mc-Dreamy, but he’s no male Julia Roberts.

About five years too late for the feminization-of-men watercooler moment, Made of Honor, a romantic comedy attempting to capitalize on the Grey’s Anatomy star’s revived film career, arrives as an inverse of My Best Friend’s Wedding. That film also uses nuptial preparations as a lens through which to examine the improbability and romantic complications of close male-female friendship.

Made of Honor

72

Rating: PG-13

Length: 1 hour, 41 minutes

More info on: Made of Honor

Here, Dempsey, as a cad named Tom, is the unlikely right-hand man to a betrothed best friend of the opposite sex, a fine-art restorer named Hannah (Michelle Monaghan). Their inseparability seems to be predicated on Hannah’s memorization of Tom’s rules for disentangling himself from conquests - “No back-to-backs” is one, meaning he won’t see the same woman two nights in a row, even if he intends to call on her again - along with her ability to guess which dessert he will order. (Tom, to his credit, re-ciprocates by remembering obscure character traits like what flash of color drew Hannah to a favorite painting.)

And while the earlier film’s bridegroom, a sportswriter played by Dermott Mulroney, didn’t seem worth all the trouble Roberts went to in manipulating her “best man” status to derail his wedding and win his heart, at least My Best Friend’s Wedding presented clever set pieces, memorable supporting characters and the rare spectacle of Roberts using her grin for evil rather than good.

Made of Honor, like a wedding reception buffet of mints and mixed nuts when you were expecting shrimp cocktail and a chocolate fountain, has none of that. Dempsey and Monaghan fail to establish the sense of 10-years-in-intimacy suggested in an opening flashback to their first encounter, not a meet-cute but a meet-gross. The scene is a collegiate Halloween night in 1998. Tom is dressed as Bill Clinton, complete with a rubber fright mask. Thinking he’s crawling into bed with one of the many coeds dressed that night as Monica Lewinsky, instead he finds an unwelcoming Hannah, who, in self-defense, spritzes the eyes behind the mask with Calvin Klein’s Eternity. (When Tom finally removes the maskand we get a glimpse of his face, it indeed looks like the Can’t Buy Me Love-era Patrick Dempsey, which must mean that even if the makers of Made of Honor didn’t inject any sincerity into the production, they at least injected something into Patrick Dempsey.)

OK - only one more reason Dempsey doesn’t measure up as maid of honor the same way Roberts did as a best man. Or maybe two. My Best Friend’s Wedding had Rupert Everett as Roberts’ loopy limoncello shot of a wingman. In his quest to prevent Hannah from marrying a Scottish alpha male she meets on an art acquisition trip, Dempsey has to settle for Kadeem Hardison, Dwayne Wayne from TheCosby Show spinoff A Different World. (Hardison doesn’t wear his b-boy flip-up sunglasses, but it is nice to see him working.) And when MBFW staged a rehearsal-dinner serenade, it went for camp - a Burt Bacharach singalong in a tacky lobster restaurant. When Made of Honor does it, it’s a traditional Scottish love ballad in a candlelighted castle. (Yawn.)

All this is unfair, of course. Made of Honor is its own film, and not without merit. The humiliations and emasculation leveled on Dempsey’s Tom truly do present a role reversal; usually it’s the romantic heroine taking sprawling pratfalls to subvert her beauty and get a cheap laugh. (Although the movie steps on the train of that triumph by being particularly cruel at the expense of an overweight bridesmaid.)

Monaghan has diluted some of the guile she brought to roles like her breakout in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but her Hannah does seem worth Tom’s scrambling.And Paul Weiland, the film’s director, captures some beautiful photography, including loving tracking shots of the Scottish moors once the action settles there for Hannah’s wedding, and an inventively shuffling view of Hannah by Tom through a revolving door, in which her image is refracted by the twirling panes.

It just doesn’t quite add up to an honorable effort. For all the regimentation Tom’s buddies apply to his mastery of the bridesmaid-in-chief role - including drills on invitation etiquette and gift-basket fluffing - when Tom finally does take his place at the altar, he’s wearing a wristwatch, a big wedding party no-no. See? The team that planned this affair really was only half-hearted.

MovieStyle, Pages 37, 39 on 05/02/2008