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The Matchmaker is being billed as a great date movie and a romantic comedy. It's very sober for a comedy, particularly an Irish one (pun intended), and the romance is pretty much taken for granted. The always delightful Janeane Garafalo (remember her from Cop Land and Reality Bites? Oh and some great movies too!) goes to Ireland to look up her campaigning Senator's roots to save his campaign. Weak premise, but it gets her to Ireland, where, we assume, the romance and comedy will ensue.
Now I don't want to sound like some snotty international jet setter but I JUST WENT TO IRELAND in August. No, I swear I did! I have pictures! Anyway, the filmmakers apparently were as taken with the place as I was and totally forgot they were making a movie about something. |
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It's very Irish, and a great deal of things are funny IF you know what the heck they are talking about - we are talking some fine craic, laddies! So *I* was laughing and not feeling at all romantic. But the things I was laughing at were not so much jokes as "Yeah, that is funny how....etc." |
| The guy Janeane is supposed to end up with, Sean (played by David O'Hara, is funny and charming and they already look to have some grand inside joke when they first met. The chemistry between them is lovely and you are waiting impatiently for them to act on it. When they do (come on, are you surprised? Did I ruin it?) it seems an afterthought, filmicly speaking. |
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It's slow on general laughs and high on pathos - it's really just marketed wrong, but even so it does flow in a rather pat manner (ha ha so to speak) just because it doesn't know what it wants to be. I would like to read the original script before Marketing screwed it all up.
The Matchmaker himself, who is actually the hub of the film, is a really interesting character. |
| If the filmmakers had settled on the matchmaker and the festival of matchmaking, it would have been nice. If they had settled on the story with the shallowness of trying to prop up a dying campaign with contrived family ties, so be it. However, the crew and staff were obviously CHOWING down on Irish stew and salmon and Guiness and all the wonderfulness of the place and forgetting to make a movie with any linear qualities or even a theme. |
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It's OK. Ireland is gorgeous, the people are all actually like that, and one character is good enough to point out that even though it seems like a fairy land, it's as real as any other place - and that we Americans are just too herky jerky to stay there, wish as we might. So, see Janeane have a love-inducing expression on her face, plan your trip to the Emerald Isle, and feel a great deal of fondness for Milo O'Shea's matchmaker character (I cried). |
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But don't pay full price. Save your money for going to Ireland. And I am mad because I wanted to love this movie but I mostly loved reliving my trip and watching the glorious Janeane.
karina |
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