Wedding in White Movie Review

It is amazing to see Carol Kane in her leading-lady debut, 30 years ago. The woman (now 50) looks exactly the same! Same frizzy hair. Same sunken eyes. Same voice. Dorian Gray has nothing on Carol Kane.

Set in dreary Canada during World War II, Kane stars as the mouse-quiet Jeannie Dougall, stuck at home while her brother's overseas. When her brother returns home on leave with an army buddy named Billy (Doug McGrath), Billy forces himself on Jeannie after a night of boozing. When Jeannie ends up pregnant and the shame of her simpleton father (Donald Pleasence), he exacts a wrath so freakish in its methodical logic that it redeems the previous 100 minutes of rather dull exposition.

Pleasence is truly bizarre and so borderline incomprensible he needs subtitles -- delivering almost every line in a thick accent and with a cigarette clenched between his lips. In fact, most of the cast comes off as confused at best and drunken out of their minds at worst, a feeling which lends even more of a sense of horror to the film.

I'm unsure whether Wedding in White is meant as drama, horror, or a subtle satire about sexuality and morality in the Great White North. I think the film is intended as the lattermost but as it never becomes even remotely humorous, I can't say I see the movie as a comedy of any sort. The social satire isn't particularly biting either; Wedding in White is played pretty straight, but the issues of rape and unwanted pregnancy have seen too many Lifetime movies in the last 30 years to make Wedding feel fresh. Still, it's got a gaunt spareness, courtesy of Kane's lost and vacant gaze, that makes it oddly compelling. It's hard to look away from whenever she's onscreen. And hard to listen to whenever Pleasence is mumbling.