The New York Times

Review: ‘Jenny’s Wedding,’ a Lecture on Tolerance

By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS

July 30, 2015

“Jenny’s Wedding ” begins with a christening and ends with a conga line — a finale signaled so clearly that even those in the cheap seats can’t miss it. And that’s one of the many irritants in this trite, well-intentioned lecture on tolerance: The audience is always several moves ahead of the script.

As Jenny, a social worker in Cleveland, Katherine Heigl seems barely able to control her impatience with a lesbian character whose charade of heterosexuality means constantly lying to her marriage-obsessed family. Her ridiculously narrow-minded parents (Tom Wilkinson and Linda Emond) are happier believing that she is seeing a married man than that she’s on the shelf. And her vinegary sister, Anne (Grace Gummer), can’t resist crowing.

“I have everything she wants,” she says, smugly. “Two kids and a husband.” Anne’s desiccated lawn suggests otherwise, but excruciating metaphors are par for the course in a story (by the director, Mary Agnes Donoghue) that chokes authenticity with clichéd speeches and hectoring pop songs. Worse, as Jenny’s supposedly longtime lover, the usually winning Alexis Bledel must play a blank slate whose connection to Jenny is as invisible as her personality.

But “Jenny’s Wedding” isn’t really about a lesbian romance; it’s about secrets and lies and entrenched bigotry. From supermarket to firehouse, Jenny’s marital status is the sole topic of conversations packed with antiquated attitudes and who’s-to-blame arguments. The result is a movie so hopelessly late to the coming-out party that you want to haul everyone connected with it into the 21st century.

“Jenny’s Wedding” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Homophobic slurs and embarrassing dancing.

Jenny's Wedding

Director Mary Agnes Donoghue

Writer Mary Agnes Donoghue

Stars Katherine Heigl, Tom Wilkinson, Linda Emond, Grace Gummer, Alexis Bledel

Running Time 1h 34m