DREAM GIRL

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The most astonishing thing about Muriel's Wedding is that critics and civilians alike keep referring to it--favorably and unfavorably--as a romantic comedy. This says a great deal about our hunger for the innocent pleasures of the sort of film that (Four Weddings and a Funeral excepted) no one knows how to make anymore, but not much useful about writer-director P.J. Hogan's film.

There's nothing romantic about Muriel's Wedding and, a few sardonic laughs aside, very little comedy in it either. It is instead a relentless assault on what Marxists used to call petit-bourgeois values and what we have since learned to identify as middle-class dysfunction. Hogan's horrid examples are the Heslop family of Porpoise Spit, Australia. Dad is a crooked low-level politician, Mom has been rendered virtually speechless by chronic depression, and the kids all lie around watching telly and putting on weight. Daughter Muriel (played with brave, ponderous dimness by Toni Collette) is no better than the rest of this awful lot, and maybe worse, since she thinks things would be magically perfect if she could just have a church wedding with all the lacy trimmings.

How she achieves that goal (but nothing like true love) and in the process confounds false friends and temporarily betrays her only true one (a hot-wired Rachel Griffiths), finally gaining such wisdom as she can handle, forms the substance of the movie. Muriel is really a sort of Weight Watchers' Forrest Gump, only a little more dreamy and larcenous and a lot more damaged by cultural junk food; what little she knows of life she has absorbed from Abba songs. But she is a cautionary, not an exemplary, figure, and there is something bleakly bracing in the way Hogan tells her story.

--R.S.