When you run into people you cannot stand in real life, you have a chance to escape. When you run into people you can’t stand in a film that you have to review, you are trapped. In “The People We Hate at the Wedding,” Allison Janney, Kristen Bell, Ben Platt and Isaach de Bankole play the people we hate at the wedding, even though the title is supposed to be a reference to the other people at the wedding.
Meet Alice (Bell). She is not only an unmarried beautiful woman of a certain age, she is having an affair with her (younger?) boss Jonathan (Jorma Taccone) whose wife just gave birth. Alice’s gay brother Paul (Platt) has a partner named Dominic (Karan Soni), who wants them to stay with an older gay acquaintance while they are in England to celebrate the wedding of Paul’s and Alice’s half sister Eloise (Cynthia Addai-Robinson). Paul and Alice’s mother Donna (Janney), who divorced Eloise’s father Henrique (Bankole) and whose second husband, the father of Alice and Paul, has died, is also attending. Got all that?
Based on the 2016 novel that I have not read by former political aide Grant Grinder, “The People We Hate at the Wedding” takes its characters from the U.S. to London, where director Claire Scanlon (TV’s “Never Have I Ever”) is certain to ring every cliched London “bell” in a montage. In London, Donna throws herself at Henrique, who likes much younger women as a whole, but is willing. Paul is dragged unhappily by Ben into a possible threesome with his and Paul’s host Alcott (Julian Ovenden), and Alice carries on a new affair with a single man named Dennis whom she met on the plane. Dennis (Canadian Dustin Milligan) seems nice and genuinely likes Alice, so you know he’s doomed. Alice believes Jonathan is about to join her in England for the wedding, which will be celebrated in the English countryside.
