Muriel’s Wedding (1994) is More Than a Time Capsule of My Youth Abroad

Guest post alert! Today’s issue comes from Nellie Beckett, my smart and talented friend whom you may remember from her excellent piece about Mary Poppins in honor of Labor Day. She’s full of great ideas, so of course it didn’t take her long to offer up another guest post about a meaningful film from her youth. Speaking of all those great ideas in Nellie’s brain, she just started her own Substack called Kulturtante, which I am extremely excited to read because she’s been telling compelling stories in multiple mediums for years now. Please give her a follow! But only after you read what she wrote about Muriel’s Wedding, of course. Take it away, Nellie!

Cinema is magic. Forever freezing time, place, and sound on celluloid, a little bit of eternity on a reel or tape or disc or file.

I lived in Australia for three years in the 90s, and in my hazy, sunny, colorful memories, it looks a lot like Muriel’s Wedding, a film that distilled the provincially surreal, neon-camp essence of Oz at the end of the 20th century.* Our lives are sometimes inseparable from our memories of movies we watched. Muriel reminds me of what it looked like to be a young girl in a different time and place, what it felt like to stumble into adulthood as a young woman, and what it means now to strive towards wisdom, integrity, and friendship.

Baz Luhrmann gets all the love, but director P. J. Hogan will forever be my favorite splashy Aussie filmmaker.** Australian films and culture love the underdog, the outcast, the outsider—Nemo, Gallipoli, Babe, Max Rockatansky.

Muriel Heslop, played by Toni Collette, is an archetypal “Aussie battler” in her tubby and pathetic way. She’s frumpy and deceitful, shoplifting skin-tight leopard Lycra, pathetically hanging on to a high school clique of mean girls who don’t care about her. You feel their dismissal like a slap even as her own needy dragging repels them. She steals money earmarked for a multilevel marketing scheme from her crooked, small-time politician father (played by legendary Aussie ocker Bill Hunter), runs away to Sydney, and comes into her own with friend Rhonda.***

Muriel fantasizes of weddings from the opening scene, where she plays the role of a hapless wedding guest. But every wedding in this movie is doomed! She even watches the Princess Diana wedding on VHS during her shift at the video store where she works. The titular wedding comes when Muriel, who likes to try on bridal gowns under false pretenses, enters a marriage of convenience with an aspiring Olympic swimmer from South Africa.****

There’s a tiny period detail in this movie that I adore because it’s linked to a core memory of mine. Muriel finds both the bridal stores she scams and a target for her sham marriage by circling small ads in the back of an alternative weekly newspaper. Muriel’s wedding obsession reminds me a lot of when I taught a group of wedding-crazed six-year-old girls, all of whom loved talking about glamorous princess gowns, beautiful flower arrangements, fluffy white multi-tiered cakes, and bridesmaid dress colors. One of them turned to me once and asked “Miss Beckett, what do you call the prince again?” Grooms are somewhat irrelevant in the fairytale fantasia, aren’t they?

To that point, Muriel’s Wedding is both a feminist classic and a heroine’s journey: girl leaves home, girl makes friend, girl becomes woman when the fairytale doesn’t work out and still walks away with head held high.***** It subverts the traditional wedding ending found in everything from Shakespearean comedies to so many 90s feel-good classics (My Best Friend’s Wedding, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Parent Trap, etc.).

Muriel’s Wedding lacks the erotic tension of similar movies about close female friendship (Bend it Like Beckham, Thelma and Louise) but it’s a deeply romantic story about the support and freedom two women can provide for each other. Both Collette and Rachel Griffiths give breakout performances—you can see and feel the irreverent, sparky talent that would animate their careers for decades. I mean, who hasn’t fantasized about what they would say to their high school tormentors, or how they would show them up given the chance? 

Muriel’s makeover has more to do with her soul than her straightened hair and her kicky outfits. She’s a more amoral heroine than those in even the most offbeat comedies, but she evolves into adulthood and womanhood when she makes good on her broken promises. The wedding vow is less important than the payment of her debts, the fulfillment of a promise to a friend, or the ability to walk away from people and situations that lack integrity.

There are a fair number of heartbreaking moments that keep it from being a completely silly confection. The emotions are completely real: rejection, betrayal, grief, shame, fear. But Hogan’s affection for his characters keeps the film from ever feeling cruel even as he lovingly pokes fun at people and places reminiscent of the ones I knew as a child. (As a former Aussie, I can tell you that “Porpoise Spit” is a goofy name intended to lampoon the Queensland beach town of Surfer’s Paradise.)

*The other movie moment that is inseparable from my memories of childhood is the London montage in Trainspotting. Despite being intended to feel like a cheesy advert, it very accurately nails the exhilarating feeling of being a kid in a global city during a decade of peace and prosperity.

**Given the nature of the heroine’s journey, it’s no surprise that Muriel’s Wedding was adapted into a musical in 2017 featuring songs originally written for ABBA. In fact, Hunter’s other flamboyant 1994 movie about small-town people living a big-city Aussie life—The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert—was also adapted into a musical in 2006. (It features an ABBA sequence, after all.) And while we’re on ABBA, Mamma Mia, which premiered on stage in 1999, lifted several elements from Muriel’s Wedding. Just look at the poster. 

***Readers of this newsletter will appreciate a scene where Muriel gets a job at the Videodrama store in Sydney and a nerdy but earnest customer asks her out. She’s wearing an amazing neo-hippie outfit; it’s very Shallow Grave, which is another great movie about young people in the big city in 1994. I love it when movies have a video store scene, unintentionally serving as a media time capsule.

 ****It was only on this rewatch that I realized the implication that her pseudo-husband is gay—or at least there’s an ambiguous tension between him and his coach. This is a gay classic for a lot of reasons, but I somehow missed that part.

Muriel’s Wedding is now streaming on Paramount+ and Hoopla, and it is available for rent elsewhere.