Classic Movie Review: 'Muriel's Wedding

Muriel’s Wedding

Directed by P.J Hogan

Written by P.J Hogan

Starring Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths

Release Date March 10th, 1995

Published March 11th, 2025

Muriel’s Wedding stars Toni Collette in a debut performance that blows the doors off. It can come as no surprise that Collette has gone on to be one of our most reliable, beloved, and extraordinary leading ladies after she absolutely smashed this comic debut. Colette’s Muriel is a complicated mess of a character, a tangle of depression, bad decisions, low self esteem, and an agonizing longing for a different life. When she finally sparks the courage to search for a new life, the journey is incredibly funny, rewarding and heartbreaking. And all of this is playing through Collette’s extraordinary performance as framed by P.J Hogan’s deft direction.

Muriel is a mousy, wedding loving, dreamer. Her life centers on two things, loving the music of Abba, her pop culture comfort food, and dreaming about getting married. Muriel may, in fact, prefer the wedding to the actual marriage and companionship. Wedding dresses, bouquets, and the pageantry of a wedding procession are her true passion, even as she rarely outright says this. The film implies Muriel’s obsession while Muriel herself just tries to remain unnoticed. This is easy among her family where she’s one of several adult children with no job and few prospects.

Muriel’s father, Bill (Bill Hunter) is a pompous, wannabe power broker, a local politician whose career has failed to progress beyond his tiny beachside home town. Nevertheless, Bill believes he is a big deal and demands to be treated as such. It’s hard not to wonder if his children have seen so little motivation or success simply because it suits Bill’s desire to mock and degrade them for not working. Muriel seems to get the brunt of Bill’s mockery which is what leads into the main plot of the movie. Wanting Muriel to have a job, Bill arranges for her to start selling cosmetics. This leads to Muriel’s mother, Betty (Jeanie Drynan), to give her a blank check intended for cosmetics supplies.

Naturally, this blank check does not go to cosmetics. Instead, Muriel takes most of her family’s money, around 12 thousand dollars, and goes on vacation. She’s chasing after her former group of friends who have abandoned her. Following them to an island vacation, Muriel finds further rejection until she bumps into Rhonda (Rachel Griffiths). Muriel and Rhonda went to High School together and they soon find out they should have been friends all along. They have the same interests, including a mutual love of Abba, and they are both despised by Muriel’s awful group of former friends leading to a wonderful scene of comeuppance for the cruel quartet of former friends.

Rhonda convinces Muriel to move to Sydney with her, the film is set in Australia, which I have neglected to mention, until now, and the two get jobs and an apartment together. This is the fun and games portion of the script but that comes to a quick end when Rachel finds out she has cancer and loses the ability to walk. Now, Muriel must decide if she wants to take care of her new best friend or continue pursuing her dream of a perfect wedding, by any means necessary. This conflict leads to something you definitely will not be able to predict if you don’t know anything about Muriel’s Wedding. There is certainly a wedding but it’s not what you might expect.

The fun of Muriel’s Wedding comes in the details. Writer-director P.J Hogan makes bold choices in letting the movie be a little mean spirited. Muriel’s Wedding borders on some genuine traumatic cruelty here and there. This modest amount of nastiness keeps the movie off kilter, assuring that the movie will not tip over into any kind of typical schmaltz. If the film had been made any other way, it would today be seen as a ‘Girl Power’ movie about a dowdy girl who overcomes the bitchy popular girls to become a girlboss. That’s not this movie. Muriel herself, willingly gets down in the mud and the muck, making questionable and mean decisions of her own that keep you surprised throughout.

It’s a risk to make your protagonist live down to the way the character is repeatedly insulted early in the movie, but it works. It makes us long for her to turn things around and earn a redemption arc. Whether we get that redemption or not, you can probably guess, but I won’t spoil anything here other than to say that I enjoyed the note the movie closed on. Muriel’s Wedding is fun and funny but it’s also boldly ugly in ways American films of a similar comic perspective seem to always get wrong. Being mean isn’t funny, but learning from having been wrong and hurting people you care about can be quite funny and healing. That’s the sweet spot for Muriel’s Wedding.

I need to end this review but, before I do, I have to praise the performance of Rachel Griffiths as Rhonda. Griffiths is a shot of adrenaline in Muriel’s Wedding. While Collette earns our sympathy and frustration as the lead, Griffiths comes barreling into the movie with attitude and charisma to spare. She’s rather reminiscent of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, that magical being who screenwriters usually birth into the lives of sad male protagonists to magically turn their life around. But instead, she’s tossed into the life of Muriel like a human grenade, blowing away all of the nastiness and ugliness of Muriel’s life, for a little bit anyway, and helping Muriel find herself amid all of her lying and poor decisions. Though she’s stereotypically the acerbic best friend character, she slowly and unexpectedly becomes the secret, big beating heart of the movie.

Muriel’s Wedding is the subject of the next I Hate Critics 1995 Podcast. Each week, myself and my co hosts, MJ and Amy, talk about a movie that was released 30 years ago that same weekend. The goal is to examine how movies and culture have changed in just three decades. It’s a really fun experiment and we’ve had a blast looking back at these 30 year old films. You can find the I Hate Critics 1995 Podcast on the regular I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast feed, wherever you listen to podcasts.