Best Keanu: “I’m all fucked up and I always will be.”

Best Keanu (honorable mention): “You eat like a raccoon!”

Frank and Lindsay, the folks played by Keanu and Winona Ryder in Destination Wedding, are really horrible people. They’re annoying, bitter, and offensive.

They’re also lonely, and one can assume entirely lacking in social skills. It’s hard to tell that latter point from the movie, because Frank and Lindsay engage in dialogue with absolutely no one except each other.

I mean no one — not a ticket agent at the airport or another random wedding guest. Which is probably for the best, because it’s likely no one would understand them anyway. Frank and Lindsay engage in exhausting, fast dialogue that includes words like “soma,” “sartorially,” and “Byzantine.”

Trust me on this: when you watch this movie — and I recommend you do, because honestly, it’s wonderful Keanu, wonderful Keanu and Winona, and satisfying in a weird but not-quite-romantic-comedy sort of way — turn on the closed captioning. You’ll need it to follow the dialogue.

And this movie is all dialogue. Constant, never-ending dialogue. The dialogue only stops when Frank is alone in his hotel room, staring at his television looking about as pathetic as a middle-aged man can look, and when Lindsay is breathing directly into plants, willing them to survive.

I promise, I liked this movie. But it was tough for me to determine exactly why I liked it.

There are some obvious pluses. I laughed. I laughed a lot.

I appreciated the freedom to not like the main characters, because they do jerky things. They spend a long time trying to figure out what “pansexual” means — in practice. Frank tells Lindsay he likes that her arms are athletic, “but not sapphic.” They bemoan that they are rich people, and therefore no one cares about their problems. Basically, the two people you don’t want to sit next to at a party? Frank and Lindsay.

There’s a fantastic, funny scene from 41:30 to 50:00 or so. It’s when Frank and Lindsay fess up to a whole lot of self-hatred and misery. Plus, the scene features a gorgeous Garry Oak tree, which made me think back to a summer job I had once for a nature organization trying to preserve those very trees and their ecosystems.

The movie’s weird tension gets its release after Frank and Lindsay get theirs — somewhere in that 41:30 to 50:00 window — and then, the dialogue still constant — it becomes a question of where do they go from here.

It’s not that you want Frank and Lindsay to give it a go beyond the weekend so much. It’s more that you want them to recognize that they’ve been given this brief window of opportunity to make their lives better.

Everyone needs someone, and everyone deserves someone. And absolutely no one else would want to be in a relationship with either one of these people. But they have a kind of liking for each other. As the clock is ticking on their weekend, you want them to recognize they have to grab this rare chance they have to break out of their own sorrow.

So the actual reason I like this movie isn’t so deep. There are two people, lonely and miserable. They are very comfortable with their defenses. But they have this opening, this offering from life that might allow them to find connection.

As for why this is wonderful Keanu — as exhausting as the dialogue could be, it was fantastic to hear Keanu in a role where he has real, intelligent conversation. Is there another movie in the Keanu canon that lets him do this? Speak real words and exchange real thoughts with another character?

If there is, I haven’t come across it yet. Keanu fell into Frank as thoroughly as he fell into John Wick or Thomas Anderson (circa 2021). Frank is a jerk, but he’s emotional when sitting with his arm around Lindsay, watching television. The facade of Frank breaks when he smiles and laughs on occasion in Destination Wedding, but even that is enjoyable to watch,

I’m telling you though. Closed captions. And maybe have a dictionary handy.

March 2022