Movie review: ‘White Wedding’

The warm and charming “White Wedding” is like “The Hangover” off steroids. It’s another get-me-to-the-church-on-time obstacle course but filled with smart social commentary, romantic wisdom, credible complications and memorable characters. Along the way, director Jann Turner (who co-wrote the script with the film’s co-leads Kenneth Nkosi and Rapulana Seiphemo) provides an absorbing physical and cultural snapshot of contemporary South Africa that deepens but never burdens this buoyant, energetic effort.

Roly-poly neurotic Elvis (Nkosi) and commitment-phobic womanizer Tumi (Seiphemo) are an odd couple of best buddies whose glitch-filled, cross-country road trip threatens to derail not only their longtime friendship but Elvis’ days-away marriage to the lovely if conflicted Ayanda (Zandile Msutwana). The guys’ journey from Johannesburg to Cape Town for Elvis’ traditionally formal “white wedding” (which, unbeknown to the groom, is undergoing its own 11th-hour transformation) gets waylaid from the start and becomes compounded by crossed wires, broken axles, missing grandmas, redneck barflies and, oh, yes, a troublesome goat.

Elvis and Tumi’s shaky ground is further tested by Rose (wonderfully played by Jodie Whittaker), a down-on-marriage British doctor who hitches a ride with them. The trio’s swift, satisfying growth reflects as much about the symbiosis between men and women as it does about racial harmony, especially in a place still as residually polarized as post-apartheid South Africa.

—Gary Goldstein

“White Wedding.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes. In English, Zulu, Afrikaans and Xhosa with English subtitles. At Landmark’s Nuart Theatre, West Los Angeles.