Andy García goes full Dadzilla in a bright, fizzy update of Father of the Bride
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A dad is a dad is a dad, whether he lands in 1950, 1991, or 2022. Like Spencer Tracy and Steve Martin before him, Andy García's Billy is not remotely prepared to watch his daughter say "I do." And so he makes the maximum mess a middle-aged man can in Father of the Bride (on HBO Max June 16), a sunny, warmhearted family comedy about a flailing patriarch doing his Boomer best not to lose both his little girl and his mind before the reception wraps.
That the film is centered on a Cuban-American clan in Miami is probably the most notable update in director Gary Alazraki's adaptation, though he handles it so breezily that the film feels less like a market-tested corrective than a fizzy celebration of a tale as old as time (or at least 20th-century wedding mores). There's still a generation gap as wide as a turnpike, a slapstick series of self-imposed but always-surmountable obstacles, and the reassuring promise of happily-ever-after by the closing credits. For all its adherence to the featherweight farce of the source material, though, there's one early twist that the previous versions didn't touch: As the movie opens, Billy and his wife Ingrid (Gloria Estefan) are on the verge of divorce.
Claudette Barius/Warner Bros.
A successful architect who never tires of recounting his immigrant-bootstraps origin story (if Coral Gables ever got snow, he would have walked uphill from Havana both ways), he's adamant that hard work and solvency are the only things that matter; she's had enough of his firm and the Fishing Channel taking up more bandwidth than their marriage. But when their eldest child Sofia (Morbius's Adria Arjona), a newly minted New York lawyer, abruptly announces on a trip home that she's met the love of her life and intends to marry him within the month, Ingrid reluctantly agrees to put their own news on pause until the wedding goes through.
Billy wastes no time broadcasting his strenuous objections to the whole plan, and the arrival of Sofia's fiancé Adam (Luis Miguel: The Series' Diego Boneta, handsomely bland) sends him into a true tailspin: Who is this soft baby-man with his talk of yoga and hiking and working at a nonprofit? And why do they have to move to his native Mexico? He has a lot of questions and little patience for the answers, though the only person who seems capable of interrupting his ongoing monologue is the wedding planner (Saturday Night Live's Chloe Fineman), a blond whirlwind who swings blithely between cheerful TikTok aphorisms and severely misguided cultural hot takes. (She says "Latinx" like it rhymes with "sphinx," and suggests a "flamenco and flamingos" theme.)
As the date gets closer and the colorful in-laws begin pouring in, Billy descends into full Dadzilla mode, a man increasingly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That doesn't leave a lot for the supremely competent women in his life to do, other than look on disapprovingly and try to contain the wreckage, though the actresses (including Sicario: Day of the Soldado's Isabela Merced as the bohemian younger sister) are universally likable in their roles. The screenplay, by Matt Lopez, leans bright and broad, but there are sweetly specific moments scattered throughout, from a whisper-fight over dominoes at the local social club to the frequent snatches of Spanish woven into the dialogue. Like 2018's Crazy Rich Asians, Alazraki's take combines glossy escapism with storytelling that centers a demographic long relegated to the sidelines in mainstream American movies. Two-plus decades into the new millennium, that shouldn't be news, though Father is surely important for all those reasons; mostly, it's just fun. Grade: B+
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