My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Released 2002
Stars Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Michael Constantine, Lainie Kazan, Andrea Martin, Joey Fatone
Directed by Joel Zwick

Everyone in this movie looks like they could be a real person. The romance involves not impossibly attractive people, but a 30-year-old woman who looks OK when she pulls herself out of her Frump Phase, and a vegetarian high school teacher who urgently needs the services of Supercuts. Five minutes into the film, I relaxed, knowing it was set in the real world, and not in the Hollywood alternative universe where Julia Roberts can't get a date.

"My Big Fat Greek Wedding" is narrated by Toula Portokalos (Nia Vardalos), who, like all Greek women, she says, was put upon this earth for three purposes: to marry a Greek man, to have Greek children, and to feed everyone until the day she dies. Toula is still single, and works in the family restaurant (Dancing Zorbas), where, as she explains, she is not a waitress, but a "seating hostess." One day a guy with the spectacularly non-Greek name of Ian Miller (John Corbett) walks in, and she knows instinctively that marriage is thinkable.

Summary by Roger Ebert

I had absolutely no desire to watch this movie, but sometimes you have to throw the wife a bone to keep her happy. Fortunately for me, I liked the movie. I liked the way it started with the mousy, frumpy, 30 year-old girl who just wanted more. It gave the movie a heart, and it didn't lampoon her Greek family like I thought it would. Instead it's more celebratory, which made it warm and fun. I laughed at many things in the intro, like how Toula (Nia Vardalos) had to eat her Greek lunch by her swarthy self while the pretty blonde girls ate their Wonder Bread sandwiches at their own table. The film understands the nuances of being an ethnic outsider, but it doesn't dwell on them. While I thought the movie played fair with the Greek family, I thought it went overboard in stereotyping Ian's (John Corbett) whitebread parents. There's a lot of potential for poking fun at WASPs, as we've seen in zillions of movies, but this movie doesn't find any of it. It chooses to make them catatonic, which is just boring. That caused the last act to drag for me, but I still enjoyed the overall warmth of the movie. --Bill Alward, April 27, 2003