Katherine Heigl (left) and Susan Sarandon in “The Big Wedding” (Barry Wetcher)
How many Oscar winners does it take to totally screw up a comedy? The brutally unfunny, cringe-worthy “The Big Wedding’’ provides ample opportunities for Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon and Robin Williams to embarrass themselves.
To be fair, they’re repeatedly enabled by writer-director Justin Zackham, who borrows a tortured premise from a French farce and embellishes it with bizarre plot turns to the point where the actors’ stereotypical characters bear only the most fleeting resemblance to actual human beings.
A randy recovering alcoholic sculptor, De Niro’s character is first seen preparing to perform oral sex on his longtime live-in girlfriend, Sarandon.
This is mercifully interrupted by the arrival of his ex-wife (Keaton) who has returns to the family manse in Connecticut for the impending nuptials of their adopted youngest son (Ben Barnes) to Amanda Seyfried.
But the surprise arrival of Barnes’ birth mother (Patricia Rae) from Colombia — prompts the son to beg his parents to pretend they’re still married. This is for the sake of the purportedly devout Catholic mother, since he never told Mama his parents were divorced.
Still with me? As if that wasn’t dysfunctional enough, we’ve got a subplot starring the dread Katherine Heigl as De Niro and Keaton’s daughter, freshly separated from her husband after a lengthy course of in vitro fertilization.
The even more underemployed Topher Grace also gets to cash a paycheck as their older son, a 29-year-old virgin and obstetrician who instantly falls in love with his adopted brother Barnes’ skinny-dipping sexpot sister (Ana Ayora)
And then there’s the bride’s parents, a stockbroker who’s being investigated for fraud (David Rasche) and his wife (Christine Ebersole) who — no, you wouldn’t believe me in a million years.
Williams is the wacky priest who presides over the wedding ceremony — but even he can’t wring any laughs out of what’s probably the first-ever montage set in a church confessional (De Niro cracks a joke about Oscar Wilde “making whoopee with altar boys”).
Does De Niro’s character fall off the wagon? Will he and Keaton end up in bed together? Does Heigl’s character, who in one scene throws up on De Niro, have an announcement of her own?
No points for guessing the right answer.
“I’d rather gouge my eyes out with hot spoons!’’ De Niro exclaims at one point. I’m not sure exactly what he was talking about, but I’d like to think it referred to the prospect of being forced to watch “The Big Wedding.’’
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