Script: Hook 'Em With a Heart of Gold

The Wedding Date is not a new story by any means. Debra Messing hires Dermot Mulroney, a male escort, to pose as her boyfriend at her sister’s wedding. Her ex-fiance is there of course, and comedy ensues as she tries to make him jealous while finding herself strangely attracted to her fake date. The Pretty Woman comparison is inevitable.

I saw Pretty Woman as a 12 year old and loved it. Seeing it again, significantly older and a little wiser, I found the portrayal of prostitution problematic – and creepy. Really creepy. But if we can get past that, the film works as a romantic comedy.

The Wedding Date knows today’s audiences are aware of the realities of prostitution, so how to deal with this, without coming across as naïve or creepy? The answer is to not deal with it at all.

The film has no first act to speak of, which seems to be a trend these days (for a more detailed and eloquent discussion of this, please see Brollywood). This frees up having to show us Dermot at work, establishing he only serves female clientele (yeah, right), or the messiness of Debra talking numbers and haggling. This may have saved some ugliness, but starting where we do, with them meeting for the first time on the airplane to the wedding, is discombobulating and it takes us a while to find out who these people are.

In fact, we never do find out. Tip-toeing around Dermot’s day, or night job, ultimately hurts this film, as they simply avoid dealing with Dermot at all – his character is woefully underdeveloped. We never get to know who he is, why he does what he does, or why he even likes Debra. I wasn’t even expecting them to wind up together, since he is really an object rather than a character, much as Veronica Lake was only ever “The Girl” in Sullivan’s Travels. We find ourselves thinking of Dermot as “The Hooker”.

This is too bad, since Mulroney gives a decent performance. We kind of believe he is falling in love with Messing (although the script gives us no reason why he would) and he has some great lines – “I hate anchovies, I have a bachelor of arts and I think I would miss you even if I never met you.” Sadly, this feels hollow, since we miss having ‘met’ either of these characters, too.

To be fair we don’t get to know Debra either. Which is too bad, because the events of the third act could have been really satisfying in a chick-flick kind of way – if we knew either of these characters, and had a first act to set up the arcs I’m guessing they both were supposed to have.

Audiences will suspend a lot of disbelief, and the hooker with a heart of gold seems to be an archetype we’re happy to embrace. In the case of The Wedding Date, embracing Mulroney’s profession a little more may have served the story better - if only so we knew who we were dealing with.