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Our Family Wedding Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some sexual content and brief strong language) Genre: Comedy Theater release: March 12, 2010 by Fox Searchlight Directed by: Rick Famuyiwa Runtime: 1 hour 20 minutes Cast: America Ferrera (Lucia Ramirez), Lance Gross (Marcus Boyd), Forest Whitaker (Bradford Boyd), Carlos Mencia (Miguel Ramirez), Diana-Maria Riva (Sonia Ramirez), Regina King (Angela), Anjelah Johnson (Isabella Ramirez) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Our Family Wedding is a story of two fathers getting married.

Well, not precisely. It is actually more conventional: a story of a young man and woman getting married. But their fathers — and, to a lesser extent, other family members—throw themselves into the center of affairs and complicate them.

Lucia (America Ferrera, star of the TV show Ugly Betty) and Marcus (Lance Gross) have been living together and were just secretly engaged. At the start of the film, they hop a train to Los Angeles and break the big news to their families at a joint dinner. Lucia is more than a little nervous, since her father has never even heard of Marcus until now. Plus, no one in her family knows that she's been living with him or that she's dropped out of law school so that she can go with him to Laos, where he will work with humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders. So when she and Marcus share the news, Lucia decides to cover up the fact that she's been living with Marcus and isn't finishing law school. Even so, the announcement sets off a firestorm, and the families don't exactly hit it off.

America Ferrera as Lucia, Lance Goss as Marcus

Lucia's family is Mexican American and Marcus's is African American, and Our Family Wedding plays this up as a comedy of culture clashes. This set-up has been done before—think My Big Fat Greek Wedding—but this is more unusual in that both families are ethnic minorities. I was interested to see what might come of this.

Not a whole lot does, unfortunately. Racial verbal jabs abound, but they are predictable and not particularly funny. (Full disclosure: I'm white.) And we are never convinced that anyone really means what they say. Lucia's father, Miguel (Carlos Mencia), and Marcus's father, Bradford (Forest Whitaker), engage in most of the verbal sparring, but it all feels like a hollow routine. (Mencia, incidentally, is best known as a comedian.) Their mutual antagonism has more to do with an extraordinarily coincidental run-in they have hours before the dinner than with cultural assumptions or innate prejudices.

If you have seen Gran Torino, you'll remember Clint Eastwood's virulently racist character. To listen to the elaborate, non-stop slurs he fires off is uncomfortable. But strangely enough, it's also funny because, as extreme and offensive as those slurs are, you believe that they are coming from a real, eccentric, and yes, racist old man — not a standup comic. Moreover, when Eastwood's character does begin to shed a little of his racist baggage, it really means something.

Forest Whitaker as Bradford, Carlos Mencia as Miguel

Likewise, this shortcoming of Our Family Wedding detracts from more than the comedy. In an interview with Collider.com, lead actress Ferrera says that the film demonstrates how, between cultures, "there are all these differences, and yet the core is the same… . We're all so much more alike than we think." Well, that kind of revelation would have been more meaningful in the film if there had been more legitimate "differences" in the first place.

But this isn't just a film about (or not about) race. It's also about the pitfalls of planning a wedding, especially when both families have strong ideas about how the ceremony must go. As the couple learns: "Our marriage, their wedding."

In one amusing scene the families sit down and try to plan seating arrangements for the reception. The difficulty of the process is underscored by the complicated set of tiny markers and icons they use to map out different combinations of people and tables. As already mentioned, though, the fathers are two of the biggest obstacles to the union. Not only does their dislike for each other create havoc, they also harbor deep reservations about the marriage. Bradford is divorced; this makes him skeptical that Marcus can really know that Lucia is the one for him. Meanwhile, Miguel gives Marcus heat for the fact that he didn't ask him for his daughter's hand in marriage, and for his mistaken notion (caused by Lucia's cover-up story about her law school plans) that Lucia will be forced to be the breadwinner.

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