I should hate this film. A possessive father loses the plot at the notion that his 22-year-old daughter – a sophisticated architecture student just back from a semester in Rome – is engaged to a man he hasn’t met. After she tells him the news at dinner, we see her saying it a second time through his eyes, as a seven-year-old. When the groom arrives, dad almost has an aneurysm at him daring to put his hand on her leg, and starts watching America’s Most Wanted every night looking for his face. He goes so cuckoo bananas over the prospect of their wedding that he loses it at the supermarket and briefly ends up in jail. “I was no longer the man in my little girl’s life,” he rues. It is paternalistic nonsense, and it is perfect.
I first watched the 1991 remake of Father of the Bride (FOTB) as a kid because it is my dad’s favourite film. As his only daughter I categorically refuse to read into this, though I enjoyed telling my boyfriend when I made him endure my recent rewatch. (Roughly my 975th viewing; his first and, I suspect, only.) It’s the film that made me fall in love with Steve Martin, our paranoid FOTB George Banks, and Diane Keaton, optimistic MOTB Nina, whom I came to regard as my cinematic parents, a comfort whenever I see them on screen.
