Jumping the Broom is a movie about a poorly planned wedding. I don’t mean the arrangements for the service and the reception (although the latter are in the care of a frazzled blonde, played by Julie Bowen, whose comic potential is scratched deeply enough only to be cringe-making). I mean planning as something that you do for people whom you care about. Only idiots would wait until the rehearsal dinner to introduce parents of such wildly divergent social backgrounds, and neither Sabrina (Paula Patton) nor Jason (Laz Alonso) is an idiot. Their oversight and/or wishful thinking is never explored, because the wild divergence in their social backgrounds, aside from being something that they have personally triumphed over, is there for comic effect only. But the laughter never really muffles the cruelty of the embarrassment to which the mothers of the happy couple are subjected. 

The duel of the mothers, played by Loretta Devine (his, poor) and Angela Bassett (hers, rich) calls for the two actresses to do everything they can think of to make themselves unsympathetic. Ms Devine looks mean and dowdy most of the time, and Ms Bassett always looks like Medea. You just wish that they could don a couple of T shirts and get down to the mud wrestling. Instead, the rich mom speaks French and declares, with odiously unsociable conceit, that not only were her forebears never slaves, they owned slaves. Happily, I suppose, the beady self-righteousness of the poor mom is enough to keep your dislike of these witches in perfect balance. Postal workers and Martha’s Vineyard homeowners had, until Jumping the Broom, little common ground for outrage, but this screenplay, by Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs, has filled the lack. 

Ms Patton is adorable in the same way that Amanda Peet is adorable in Something’s Gotta Give; close your eyes, and you would never guess that these girls didn’t grow up in the same well-tended garden. Mr Alonso’s performance is awkward in exactly the manner of a jeune premier in a Broadway musical comedy; when he tries to sound sincere, it would be better if he could just sing. I mean it as a compliment: it’s only right that an actor should cough and burp when his character is asked to declare respect for a fiancé’s silly primness. The couple’s more estimable achievement is holding center stage while competing love interests sprout to either side, between his mother’s colleague, the genuinely funny Tasha Smith, and her cousin from Yale, played by Romeo Miller; and between her bridesmaid, Meagan Good, and the catering chef, Gary Dourdan. (The ineptness of the latters’ love scene in the kitchen, while pone burns, ought to be taught, prophylactically, in film schools.) Valarie Pettiford, Mike Epps, DeRay Davis, Pooch Hall, and a rather tired-looking Brian Stokes Mitchell do what they can to push the stone uphill, while a pixieish Vera Cudjoe cajoles one into wondering if Cicely Tyson is doing another cameo. All in all, the cast gives this bad film the visual pizzaz to make it well worth sitting through. It’s only when the screen goes dark that you ask yourself what all that was about.

I feel somewhat impertinent criticizing Jumping the Broom, because it struck me as sending a fusillade of coded messages to an intended black American audience. Without atttempting any deciphering, I’ll just point out that the movie is given to pretending that its true subject is pre-marital continence. At one awful moment, Sabrina apologizes to Jason’s penis for arousing an erection that cannot be — what’s the word? “eased”? — until the next day’s ceremony. At another, equally awful moment, the bridesmaids speculate about Jason’s fortitude in the face of Sabrina’s virginal vows; maybe he’s on the down low! The juxtaposition of raunch and respectability curdles the fun; Jumping the Broom is neither the farce nor the comedy of manners that it might have been. The whole idea of “saving it for marriage” seems wrong-headed if not delusional, resting as it does on the presumption that, since two sexy-looking people are sure to find erotic satisfaction in one another’s arms, they might as well wait until they’ve bound themselves together. I no longer live in a world in which such a view seems moral; indeed, it seems quite immoral. What a message! 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.