Sadly Over-hyped

Highly Overrated But Still Good

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

After watched this movie in late of nineties and found it above average movie...many years this film was release on DVD here for an small label. Today l re-watched again this amazing movie about self respect,love, loyalty,contempt and mainly happiness,Toni Collette is your best role ever,gave to the movie a cult reputation....incredible funny sometimes and sadness too...support by Abba soundtrack it's a really fresh and original movie from Australia

If you are looking for a fantasy movie then this is it, base mostly in Australia this movie will take you on an adventure. A young lady loving ABBA tries to find her dream wedding, problem is she has never had a date or really good friends.she deals with love, dreams, family, heart break and friends problems a long the way,she moves to the city with her best friend to change her life, when she is in the city she has a job, a home and she finds a guy she likes but that isn't the end of it at all, she will do anything to have a dream wedding. Throughout this movie there will be lots of laughs and some tears. Personally it is one of the best 1994 movie I have seen in a while, grab your best friends this movie some food for a night of laughter.

Muriel's Wedding is the story of a young woman's journey from self-loathing to self-loving. Her family is plagued with low self-esteem, depression, deception, and recrimination. Muriel escapes to a fantasy world, culminating in dreams of marriage that she believes will help her escape the self that she loathes. It is only through tragedy that she sees the shallowness of her own deceptions, and the importance of being her genuine self.Muriel's Wedding is a wonderfully written and acted film. Some parts tend to caricature, yet this is entirely appropriate given that the people portrayed are themselves so superficial and cliché. The principal characters of the story are finely acted: we feel both their despair and effervescent joy. Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths are perfectly cast. The quality of both the script and acting is proved through our love of such a flawed protagonist.Muriel's Wedding is a great Australian movie, and a thoroughly recommended tale of self-discovery.

One of the hallmarks, and one of the strengths, of the Australian cinema, is originality, the ability to produce films quite different from anything in the Hollywood or British mainstream. This ability dates back to the days of "Walkabout", "Picnic at Hanging Rock" and "Crocodile Dundee", and the offbeat comedy "Muriel's Wedding" from 1994 falls within the same tradition. It also falls within the recent Australian tradition of films satirising life in the provinces while retaining a certain affection for those that live there. ("Sweetie" and "Opal Dreams" are other examples). The film was written and directed by Paul J. Hogan, not to be confused with his namesake Paul Hogan of "Crocodile Dundee" fame.The main character, Muriel Heslop, is a young woman in her early twenties from the fictitious Queensland seaside town of Porpoise Spit. Her life is dominated by her tyrannical father Bill, an ambitious and corrupt local politician, whose family seem crushed by the weight of his expectations. Muriel's mother Betty is a downtrodden, subservient wife and her siblings are lazy, unambitious and permanently unemployed, with no interests in life other than watching television. She herself is overweight, naïve and socially gauche; she is mocked by her contemporaries, even those she considers her friends, for her weight, her lack of social graces, her lack of fashion sense, and her obsession with the music of ABBA, regarded as hopelessly untrendy by the mid-nineties. (Several ABBA songs feature on the soundtrack). Although she has never had a serious boyfriend, her one great ambition is for a glamorous wedding.Muriel's life changes when, while on holiday, she makes a friend named Rhonda who, unlike her Porpoise Spit contemporaries, is prepared to accept Muriel for what she is. Muriel leaves her family to set up house in Sydney with Rhonda and eventually achieves her dream of a big white wedding, although the circumstances are rather unusual. Muriel's husband is David, a handsome young South African swimmer, whom she hardly knows but who needs an Australian passport in order to swim for his adopted country in the Olympics. (This plot line suggests that the film was originally conceived several years earlier, when South Africa was banned from international sport because of apartheid).Toni Collette was relatively unknown in 1994, but this was the part that first brought her to international attention, and she gives an excellent performance, making Muriel an appealing heroine despite her social awkwardness. There are some other good performances, such as from Bill Hunter as Muriel's autocratic father, but I was less taken by Rachel Griffiths as Rhonda, even though I have admired Griffiths in other films such as "Hilary and Jackie". Although she is supposed to be a likable character, Muriel's one true friend who loves her for what she is and who copes bravely with illness and disability, I found the foul-mouthed, promiscuous Rhonda a bit too abrasive to be sympathetic.Although "Muriel's Wedding" is a comedy, and in places a very funny one, it also deals with some serious themes, and avoids Hollywood sentiment. (Hollywood would doubtless have made Muriel slimmer and prettier, would given greater prominence to David and would have turned the film into a rom-com in which the two young people end up falling madly in love). It is essentially a coming-of-age story, what in German would be called a "Bildungsroman". It is the story of the heroine's discovery of self-confidence rather than self-loathing, of how she learns to accept herself for what she is. It is notable that for much of the film she insists on being called "Mariel", only to revert to "Muriel" by the end. Behind the humour and the satire the film is often touching and poignant. 7/10