Table 19 is a 2017 comedy/drama about a former maid of honor, dumped by the best man, now seated with a random group of guests.
There’s the devil’s rejects, and there’s the wedding rejects. Eloise (Anna Kendrick) was slated to be the maid of honor for her best friend’s wedding, but a recent messy breakup with the best man in all of the proceedings, Teddy (Wyatt Russell), has left her in a bad way. Not wanting to attend, she decides to, only because it’s her best friend getting hitched.
No longer being a central part of the ceremony, Eloise is relegated to Table 19, where all of the people who have only the slightest connections to the bride and groom take space at. These people include the rocky Jerry & Bina Kepp (Craig Robinson, Lisa Kudrow), awkward Walter (Stephen Merchant), preteen hormone raging Rezno (Tony Revolori), and retired nanny Jo (June Squibb). They are the forgotten at this wedding, but rest assured, by the time this ceremony is over, they’ll make their presence felt.
The Breakfast Club at a reception table? Or maybe the Suicide Squad (hyperbole) at a reception table? That’s kind of what Table 19 comes off as. Just without the memorable characters or honest feel-good aspect of the John Hughes classic. Popular acting names and a tight runtime can’t save this production from feeling predominately forced.
Independent movies can be cool sometimes, offbeat and charming enough to compensate for real flaws. And other times they can be just as lazy, if not more so, than their big budget brethren, relying on being an indie movie for artificial heart. From the get-go, something feels off with Table 19. Maybe it’s the song used, or how the meat of the story is set-up, essentially in a montage that does little to expand on its characters. In about five minutes time, the rejects are brought together and the story starts. Very haphazard it is, and director Jeffrey Blitz seems to rely on the novelty of the idea to sell what happens rather than any real solid writing. While some characters’ backgrounds are delved into at the table (Kendrick, Robinson, Kudrow—the focus is primarily on them), some are not (Squibb, Revolori, Merchant).
One of the biggest—if not the biggest—issue with the comedy-drama Table 19 is that it isn’t competent in any of its tagged genres. Save for Merchant, who is funny more times than not, the movie fails badly to tickle the funnybone. This shouldn’t be hard with Robinson, Kudrow, and to some extent Kendrick, as known quantities in comedy, but I can’t remember laughing once legitimately to anything their characters said or did. Most of them are written to be annoying or flat out uninteresting. One can see why each of them was relegated to the table no one would really notice. The drama is written so thick and melodramatic it’s hard to take seriously. There’s some meaning of “people not being right for each other yet actually being right and that’s love” that is just as messy as it sounds.
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Doesn’t help that Blitz edits Table 19 in an odd way, for a significant period in the runtime cutting between the reception and serious moments with the outcasts all alone in a hotel room. It’s distracting, and does little, if nothing, to connect more with the characters. 2017 is still young, but an early contender for Worst Scene of the Year award has emerged in Table 19, featuring a shirtless Robinson entering a shower with a bare Kudrow trying to find the spark again set to awful background music. Not romantic or heartwarming, just awkward and embarrassing. The “happy ever after” ending doesn’t exactly come out of left-field, but is not earned.
Outside of a briefly fun premise and an amusing Merchant, Table 19 doesn’t do anything well. Even if you could sit at this table, you wouldn’t want to.