Vincente Minelli’s “Father of the Bride” plays like a This American Life essay. The dialogue’s descriptive, prose-like writing is observantly funny and amusing rather than ha-ha funny, but it finds a twist on the wedding movie genre by viewing it exclusively from one character’s perspective: Dad’s.
Spencer Tracy is probably the only person who could’ve played Stanley T. Banks, so thank goodness Minnelli outright begged him to take the part. His character is often wrong and jumping to conclusions about his daughter’s (Elizabeth Taylor) new boyfriend, but only Tracy could seem appropriately level-headed and convincing. His concerns aren’t rambling and idiotic but show how a father might genuinely feel and act as they quite literally give away the person in their life who means the most to them.
“She’ll always love us, but not in the old way,” Banks says as he watches his daughter stare longingly into the eyes of the handsome Buckley Dunstan (Don Taylor). “She’ll be tossing scraps.” This is Banks’s selfish view, but it’s not completely unwarranted. Her love belongs to someone else now.
We sympathize with him because Minnelli never leaves Banks’s side. Spencer Tracy is in every scene of “Father of the Bride,” and it’s funny because seemingly behind the scenes, the wedding that his family is planning has grown exponentially and all beyond his control. He doesn’t know how it all happened so fast, and neither do we. Minnelli suddenly places us in ungodly lavish sets and lets time and space rush by us in awkward wide shots and long takes. There’s one scene where the camera is placed looking out the front door as Banks stands in the hallway answering the phone. He can’t leave, but scurrying all around us and entering and exiting the frame from all four sides are dozens of movers and wedding planners turning the scene into chaos without any camera movement at all.
There’s a similar sensation when the wedding party rehearses the ceremony for the first time. The moment passes by in a blur. The camera is at a high angle looking down and trying to make sense of this whole fiasco, and the dialogue is all composed of carefully layered voices on the soundtrack that keep us from focusing on just one. The execution is tidy, but the feeling is of a big mess.
Best of all, “Father of the Bride” ends simply without a big moment of family love or a Stanley Kramer-esque speech delivered by Tracy. It’s just a calming conclusion to a long, hectic wedding.