The Problematics: Is ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ A Stereotype Parade Or Simply A Paragon Of Ethnic Humor?

Happy Orthodox Easter to those who celebrate. The week before this year’s Orthodox Easter marked the 20th anniversary of the release of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which, among other things, proved The Little Movie That Could of that year. Defying blockbuster logic (it happens!), the $5-million picture ultimately grossed almost $400 million worldwide. 

Reflecting on the anniversary this week, Nia Vardalos, the movie’s writer and star, tweeted: “When agents/managers said my script wasn’t good and actors shouldn’t write, I recall wondering why they were angry. They fired me. So, I changed the material into a solo stage show. Rita Wilson saw the play and said, ‘this should be a movie.’ I handed her my screenplay, this creator & producer got the film made with me as the lead. We premiered in 106 theaters, expanded to more, ran for over a year. People full of love loved it, and again some were snide, hateful. I was nominated for everything, went on to write and act in films that make people happy, employed hundreds of people, wrote and performed a New York Times Critics Pick play which has been licensed hundreds of times, wrote a bestselling book whose proceeds get children adopted, and learned: Some people who don’t create anything including jobs to make situations better, will tell you that what you do is wrong. You can’t make anyone embrace change, marginalized voices or new ideas. So love yourself. And write your story.”

Boy, she sure can hold a grudge. As it happens, Wedding, directed by Joel Zwick, has nearly identical Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (aka critics) and audience scores: 76% from critics, 73% from audiences. I guess the critics who hated it really really hated it or something. I didn’t review it and I mostly remember being annoyed that a lot of grandparents I was meeting up with at the time (there weren’t a whole lot, but there were some, for some reason) kept yelling at me because my colleagues weren’t being nice to this perfectly nice movie. 

“Perfectly nice,” as it happens, was a pretty good description of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and, as it happens, it’s still a pretty good description. I undertook to reexamine the movie relative to the acceptability of ostensible ethnic humor then and now…and was both mildly stimulated and ultimately underwhelmed. 

Hellenism has been on my mind a little because I just finished a new novel by Julian Barnes, called Elizabeth Finch. (It’s not out in the States until August, but I was just visiting London and picked it up there, nyah I went to London and you didn’t.) One of its threads involved speculation as to whether Western Civilization, such as it is, might have been better off had Christianity not taken hold, and Hellenic Paganism still held sway over our values. 

This is not (alas?) a theme of Vardalos’ work, as it happens. If you haven’t seen the movie, it begins with Vardalos’ Toula entering her early 30s under the sway of her literally oppressively Greek parents. Dad Gus (Michael Constantine) is particularly emphatic. The owner of a restaurant called Dancing Zorba’s, he’s constantly going on about how the Greeks invented philosophy, astronomy, words, and so on. There seems no inherent contradiction in that he celebrates his roots mostly through kitsch. In the meantime, Toula laments that for her and women like her, the thing to do is “marry Greek boys, make Greek babies, and feed everyone until the day we die.” Ethnic nationalism plus the patriarchy equal the ultimate engine of oppression. 

But this, and varying ostensible Greek traits — in voiceover, Toula says of her cousin Angelo, played by Joey Fatone (hey, remember him?) that he has two modes, “loud and louder” — are played for laughs here. Frequently I wondered what the movie would be like had Vardalos opted to engineer a tragedy of parental pressure, like Washington Square or something. It’s all in the stresses! Instead, the movie goes broad, as when Toula very gingerly tries to tell her dad that she wants to start a travel agency and he begins to cry, sobbing “why you wanna leave me?”

Things aren’t entirely bad at Dancing Zorba’s, where Toula of course works. It’s there that she first spies Jon Corbett’s Ian, he of the stylishly casual blazer and beautifully blow-dried hair and so much else. When he first walks into the place she’s literally dumbstruck, and it’s left at that for a bit. Because most of the first portion of the movie is Toula’s self-actualized Cinderella story. With her glasses, shapeless outfits and limp hair, Early Toula is what Helen Gurley Brown termed a “mouseburger.” 

After her impersonation of a “Greek statue” in front of Ian, Toula goes on a self-improvement drive, taking courses, changing wardrobe, using makeup, getting contacts, curling her hair, opening a travel agency. Her mom, played by Lainie Kazan putting on a very heavy accent, low-key encourages her with adages like “The man is the head but the woman is the neck.”

It’s around this section where you begin to understand why the movie was so popular. The story beats may be generic, but it’s the kind of story people root for, and Vardalos, then an unknown quantity, had a presence that felt authentic. Co-producers Wilson, Tom Hanks, and Garry Goetzman were taking a risk, but not an unprecedented one. And the movie’s title assured audiences that for all the speed bumps Toura experiences on the road to fulfillment, the movie WILL end with a wedding. 

So how about that ethnic humor? By the time Constantine’s character says “There’s two kinds of people: Greeks, and everybody who wish they were Greeks” you might be considering his condition as a kind of pathology. Nevertheless. The Greek traits hammered at here aren’t entirely removed from those observed in humor concerning Jewish or Italian characters. Although Toula’s self-flagellating monologue to Ian suggests slightly otherwise: she speaks of eating lamb brains, which I don’t think Italians or Jews do. The “27 first cousins alone” bit definitely applies to Italians, though.

Corbett’s Ian takes this in stride. (The character is classic Corbett, hot but wise and chill, as he was on both Northern Exposure and at least part of his Sex and the City arc.) “You got a weird family, who doesn’t,” he responds. And later, his very WASPy clan comes in for a little ribbing. It’s sort of equal opportunity.  (And sometimes it is rather funny, especially when Andrea Martin, in a supporting role, is on screen.)

Things do get a little hairy when Toula’s dad, trying to get Toula away from Ian, arranges a few dinners with potential beaus, and we get glimpses of nose-blowing, soup-slurping, muscle-popping doofuses. But by the time Ian decides to convert (and is baptized in a kiddie pool) we know the fix is truly in. The arranged dates montage of said nose-blowing, soup-slurping, moustache-waxing, body building doofuses ends with Toula whispering to her brother, “Soon he’s gonna look at me and go; you’re so not worth this.” To which her brother responds, “Yes you are,” AND HERE IS WHY ALL THOSE GRANDPARENTS LOVED THIS MOVIE. 

That and the fact that she does get married, and that she ends up doing the exact same thing her parents did to her as a kid, only in a more enlightened way. Or, at least that’s what we are supposed to understand. So how does this work out? Why yes, there was a sequel in 2016. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.