Word: altmans
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Screenplay by John Considine, Patricia Resnick, Allan Nicholls and Robert Altman...
Perverse? No, the picture is downright subversive, a brutal comic assault on that most basic of institutions, the family. The attack is every bit as relentless, unfair and "tasteless" as Altman's devastation of the military was in M*A*S*H. Although the family is certainly undergoing change and questioning, the director does not have a national mood of disgust (which Viet Nam provided for the earlier picture) to support him. All he has is his own disarming skill as a moviemaker to keep audiences in an accepting mood...
...very nearly enough. Many of his sharpest thrusts are contained in throwaway lines, which may be all but covered by the overlapping dialogue Altman loves to use. He demonstrates an uncanny skill at staging. His camera seems to eavesdrop almost simultaneously on a dozen conversations that reveal, in a few lines of dialogue or a fleeting expression, brilliantly encapsulated characterizations. As always, his location is full of expressive artifacts, shrewdly chosen and revealed...
...casting is both daring and first-rate. Altman has somehow made an ensemble out of a group that includes (in no particular order of significance) Lillian Gish, Pat McCormick, Howard Duff, Vittorio Gassman, Dina Merrill, Nina van Pallandt, Lauren Hutton, Mia Farrow, Geraldine Chaplin, Desi Arnaz Jr., Amy Stryker, Paul Dooley, various veterans of his stock company and a title card full of newcomers. They are all wonderful. If someone deserves to be singled out, it is Carol Burnett, who plays the bride's up tight but restless mother. For her to appear in this film took guts...
...that, however, one cannot help comparing the jumpy life of this film to the becalmed chill of that other recent assault on the sterility of bourgeois life, Woody Allen's Interiors. The contrast is all in favor of Altman. The people in A Wedding are capable of bursting their schematic bounds, of bouncing into wayward life and, in an odd way, undercutting the director's underlying message of disapproval. In the end, Altman the observant artist manages to subvert Altman the highly conventional social critic. -Richard Schickel