American Wedding

American Wedding

May the gods of film forgive me, but I am growing fond of the “American Pie” characters. Like familiar figures in a beloved sitcom, I can forgive them anything as long as they remain true to themselves. They’ve already survived high school and college in the first two “American Pie” movies, and now here they are in “American Wedding,” still ankle-deep in bodily fluids and doggy-doo; this movie cheerfully offends every civilized notion of taste, decorum, manners and hygiene, but it has a sweetness that is hard to discount, and is often very funny.

But see: The secret is that it loves its characters. Most raunchy comedies hate their characters who are stupid, crude, shallow and vulgar–and wish only ill on them. “American Wedding” wants only happiness for Jim and Michelle on their wedding day, loves Jim’s parents just for being who they are (his dad deserves another medal), sees that even Stifler has a heart somewhere inside him, however rudimentary, although you could spend hours deciding where.

That Michelle Flaherty (Alyson Hannigan) and Jim Levenstein (Jason Biggs) have made it through all the humiliations of the earlier films and still want to get married speaks well for their optimism. That Jim’s dad (Eugene Levy) understands his son as only a father can be expected to understand him should earn him some kind of prize.

The movie opens with Dad rushing a forgotten engagement ring to a restaurant where he doesn’t realize Michelle is hiding under the table; Dad again plays his part with such goodness and imperfection that he just about walks away with the whole movie; when you think back over some of those other dads you know from earlier American comedies about sons fumbling toward awkward man hoods while fathers struggle along after them with understanding smiles frozen on their faces like early warning systems alert to scandal and disaster but refusing to stop hoping, you realize there is a kind of greatness here, although it may not be the kind that ennobles.

This time around Levy is joined by Michelle’s dad, Harold (Fred Willard), who played the idiotic dog show announcer in Christopher Guest’s “Best in Show,” and rises to toast the union between his Irish family and the Jewish family of his new in-laws: “May we sit through many happy shivas together.”

The story involves Jim’s determination to learn to dance before his wedding; Stifler’s hopeless infatuation with Michelle’s virtuous sister Cadence (January Jones); Jim and his wedding party working feverishly to keep Stifler from attending the wedding at all costs; a walk on the wild side when Stifler ends up in a dance contest in a gay bar, and another wilder walk when a bachelor party is interrupted by Michelle’s parents.

But what I really want to talk about is Seann William Scott as Stifler. This actor has created such an uncompromising character that Stifler almost ceases being a person and becomes instead a force of nature, or perhaps one of those elementary particles responsible for cosmic mischief. He is so steadfastly self-centered that some people have detected narcissistic features in him.

It isn’t that he wants everything to be about him rather, he assumes it already is. When he meets someone for the first time, within seconds he asks himself why this person doesn’t already know everything there is to know about him. If you like yourself enough for both of you, then like this: Here stands your man.

Scott portrays these qualities with such intensity that they become admirable. We don’t dislike Stifler because he lacks virtues, but because we cannot properly appreciate them; if we did appreciate them, we would like ourselves less. His transgressions are liberations from the prison of our better natures. In this movie, when Stifler loses the wedding ring and the dog eats it and he has to retrieve it in what is obviously after a moment’s thought–the only way possible, what he does to keep his secret from Michelle’s mother (Deborah Rush) may be noble or vile, but it’s certainly necessary.

Buddy Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) and Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) are wedding party regulars, trying to fend off Stifler and keep Jim together. Bear (Eric Allan Kramer), a balding, shaggy lineman type they meet at the gay bar but who will surely be necessary for the next sequel, hates Stifler as a homophobe before having a dance off with him that ends in friendship. It’s Bear who organizes the bachelor party, providing the girls: Officer Krystal (Nikki Ziering), a leather goddess, and Fraulein Brandi (Amanda Swisten), her little Swiss maid.

“American Wedding,” directed by Jesse Dylan, written by Adam Herz, is proof of the hypothesis that no genre is beyond redemption. There is no joke too low for the movie to stoop to, no melodrama too broad or human weakness too pitiful to satirize and yet because these characters are liked by the filmmakers and performers who wish them well and want them to live happily ever after somehow or other it all becomes redeemed. Is this movie vulgar? Vulgarity is when we don’t laugh. When we do laugh that’s just human nature.

Note: In a stunning breakthrough for raunchy comedy “American Wedding” has not one credit cookie. Maybe all those outtakes stayed in there.

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