‘Mother of the Bride’: Every Wedding Should Have a Skinny-Dipping Brooke Shields

It’s not easy being a mom—just ask Brooke Shields’s character, Lana, in Netflix’s newest rom-com, Mother of the Bride. One minute, your daughter is holding you close and insisting that she can’t have her wedding without you, and the next, she’s threatening to throw you out of her big day in Thailand because you’ve upset her “corporate parent” by skinny-dipping at their resort. Mothers, you’ve all been there before, right? Anyone…?

On the surface, Mother of the Bride follows Lana as she tries to process the fact that her daughter Emma (Miranda Cosgrove) is engaged to a man she never met. To make things even spicier, the groom to be, RJ (Sean Teale), also happens to be the progeny of Lana’s grimiest college ex, Will (as played by certified zaddy Benjamin Bratt)—a not-so-fun fact the entire group finds out together when they arrive in Thailand for the destination wedding. Sadly, none of this is really the meat of the story.

It turns out, Emma’s most complicated relationship is not with her brilliant perfectionist of a mother, or with her charming but possibly performative fiancé, but with her own deep desire to become… *checks notes* a brand ambassador? Oh, boy.

From her name to her life aspiration, Ms. Emma Rose Winslow is about as generically “Gen Z” as a character can get. In the entire hour-and-a-half-long runtime of this film, she never looks happier than in the beginning, when she announces to her mother that she’s locked down a six-figure brand sponsorship deal with a high-end hotel chain. “I know it’s not grad school,” she tells her mother—who just secured another year of funding for her ground-breaking lab at Johns Hopkins—“but this is what I want to do with my life!” (Somehow, Lana manages to be genuinely supportive.) In keeping with the persistent narrative that younger generations do not have much sex, Emma and her fiancé also have about as much chemistry as any couple that has never kissed with tongue.

The emotional entanglements pile high in this movie: Lana still hasn’t forgiven Will for ghosting on their epic romance decades ago in college, and she warns Emma that RJ seems to exhibit a lot of the same emotional aloofness that his father once did. This does not help shrink Emma’s stress as she tries to plan a last-minute wedding in Phuket, sponsored by the hotel chain that’s decided to make her its face.

On a practical level, Mother of the Bride leaves a lot of questions unanswered. For instance: Are Emma and RJ’s friends all millionaires or something, because how else can they all afford last-minute tickets to Thailand on a few weeks’ notice, all for a weekend wedding? Also, do they maybe just not have many friends, because why else would they ask their parents to serve as the maid of honor and best man? Also-also, are Emma and RJ concerned about mixing business with pleasure, considering he’s also the guy that helped her grow her lifestyle socials in the first place? How does his role in her career impact their relationship? After hanging out with all of these people for 90 minutes, I still have no idea!

Instead of an amusing character study, we get a rote paint-by-numbers game. Lana’s barely repressed rage toward Will manifests in clumsy gags like accidentally pulling him into a pond when he tries to help her pick up her purse. At dinner, her chair leg manages to slam down on his foot. During a game of pickleball, she accidentally lobs a ball right into his… ugh, don’t make me say it. If that wasn’t enough to confirm she’s still got feelings, there’s also her competitive response when she finds out that he’s given their kids a multimillion-dollar condo in Tribeca as a wedding present, when all she got them was the most expensive item on their registry—a state-of-the-art cappuccino maker. If only all of us could have such expensive interpersonal tension!

Meanwhile, Emma is living in a wedding fever dream thanks to her very expensive wedding planner, the corporate rep Camala (Tasneem Roc). She’s got centerpieces from the same vendor who did Meghan and Harry’s wedding (lol), a five-figure wedding dress from “the next Vera Wang,” Daisy St. Daisy, and bridesmaids dresses from the equally important designer Klaus von Klaus. (Yes, this is played as a self-aware bit, and no, that doesn’t quite make up for how goofy it is.) Lana tries to warn her daughter that perhaps this wedding is turning into a bit of an impersonal circus, but Emma is simply too excited by the number of people who will be streaming her wedding to care. It’s right around the moment that she asks her mother to read a pre-written speech at the rehearsal dinner that I stopped caring about her altogether.

You can see the moral of this movie from a mile away. According to her mother, Emma is “losing” herself, but even by the end, when she stands up to Camala, it’s unclear who this clout-chasing brunette really is. She’s the human equivalent of walking down the aisle to Pachelbel’s Canon in D (which is, of course, her actual processional song). She’s beautiful, polished, and completely forgettable. She has no quirks or defining traits outside of her brand-safe ambitions, and because of that, her final-act epiphany flops into the hotel swimming pool with barely a splash. That said, it’s hard to blame Cosgrove for any of this; the script gives her basically nothing else to work with.

At least the grown-ups get to have more fun in this movie—although that said, supporting actors Wilson Cruz (who plays Will’s brother, Scott) and Rachael Harris (seen here as Lana’s hard-partying sister, Janice) are tragically under-used. While the kids spend all their time working and scoping out good backdrops for photo shoots, they get to actually enjoy Thailand—or at least, their resort. They go skinny-dipping, play racket sports, and get stranded by broken-down Jeeps. Chad Michael Murray even shows up as a flirtatious doctor and “Hemsworth hottie” named Lucas, whose abs help distract Lana from her drama with Will. It’s not often that the 40-year-old moms get to have more fun in a rom-com, and for that, I must respect this movie.

Don’t get me wrong; Mother of the Bride is not a particularly bad movie. Really, the shortcomings of its emotional storytelling feel pretty in keeping with the modern rom-com, which can sometimes preoccupy itself with self-awareness at the expense of actual emotional stakes. If anything, it’s all just sort of forgettable. It goes down easy like an overpriced hotel Mai Tai, and once the hangover has left your system, you’ll probably never think about it again.

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