Nicholas Stoller’s You’re Cordially Invited isn’t the great comedic experience you might hope from the combining of Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon. On the surface, both actors hold very, very different comedy styles. Ferrell’s obviously stems from his wonderfully oddball days on Saturday Night Live that he parlays into comedy gold in films like Anchroman and Talladega Nights. Nothing is too silly, too unhinged for Ferrell. He works best when paired with frequent collaboration partners Kristen Wiig or John C. Reilly — someone who accepts the weirdness as a challenge and plays along or attempts to one-up his genius insanity.
Reese Witherspoon is funny in a very different way. Her comedy stems from the unbridled rage generated from a well-formed “Karen” figure. The soccer mom with one too many glasses of wine. The career girl embittered by a family-centric world around her. The fish out of water raging against her unfamiliar environment.
Coupled together as in You’re Cordially Invited, this mismatch of styles doesn’t really work. There are still mild pleasures to be had within the film. It’s just that the two halves, wildly dominated by a very funny Witherspoon-centered world, are definitely unequal. The film’s trailers pit the actors against each other as if they’re the pairing we’ve always wanted. I doubt anyone has really asked for this matchup, and what we’re given isn’t even close to a fair fight.
Ferrell stars as Jim, the widower father of Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan) who surprises the over-compensating father with a sudden engagement. Seeking the perfect marriage for his only child, Jim books the same wedding venue he and his wife used on small island off the coast of Georgia. Witherspoon plays Margot, a high-powered reality TV show producer whose younger sister surprises with news of a sudden engagement and pregnancy. Through a strange tragedy, Margot ends up booking the same wedding venue (she and her sister spent summers on the island with their grandmother) on the same weekend as Jim’s wedding, setting up a wedding “battle royale.”
There are funny moments in the slight but entertaining film, and most of them are centered with Witherspoon and her eccentric Southern family, led by the great Celia Weston as Margot’s estranged mother. If you love HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones, then you’ll get a pretty good idea of what to expect from these sequences. I loved the interactions between the uptight Witherspoon and these genteel Southern eccentrics. I would have watched an entire film dedicated to these characters, honestly.
Ferrell’s half of the film wallows a bit in sentiment and tremendous daddy issues. It’s also saddled with tremendously unlikeable, underdeveloped, and misunderstood Gen Z characters. There’s indeed a comedy that could stem from Gen Z stereotypes, but Stoller doesn’t seem to have the capacity to give the generation the full skewering it so richly deserves. There is one moment toward the end of the film involving TikTok that gives a hint of what could have been. It was a deliciously funny segment of which the film needed far more.
While Ferrell gets a few moments of unbridled insanity (there’s an alligator sequence shown in the trailer that almost becomes dumb enough to be funny), he’s somewhat restrained by Stoller’s script. He isn’t allowed moments of improvisation for which Ferrell is so famous. I suspect Witherspoon’s (forever Tracy Flick in my mind) acting style doesn’t lend to improv. She likely prepares a great deal, which probably stifles some of Ferrell’s more raw creative instincts. Honestly, if the film weren’t focusing on Margot’s Southern roots, then I’d rather have seen someone like Kristen Wiig take on Ferrell so that they could elevate the bones of the script into something more uniformly funny.
Still, there are funny moments here and there, enough to justify its existence as a streaming film. But seriously, someone needs to give Celia Weston her own project very soon. She’s a brilliantly brittle Southern comedic force here, and she nearly steals the entire movie away from its high-wattage stars.
You’re Cordially Invited drops Thursday, January 30, on Prime Video.
