What should happen before the main characters get together?
Robbie Hart (played by Adam Sandler), the title character, meets Julia Sullivan (played by Drew Barrymore), the main female character, and you just know or it soon becomes clear that the two will eventually end up together.But, before anything can happen between them, they have to deal with their respective supposed significant others first.
In Julia’s case, this would be her fiancé named Glenn Gulia (played by Matthew Glave). The 2 have been engaged for years before finally deciding to set a date for their wedding.
The Wedding Singer’s love rival should be likable
When Glenn was first introduced, he seemed like a nice and pretty okay person, which was how it should be. Gulia is supposed to be a likable character because, otherwise, why would Julia want to marry him? Why would she even fall in love with him if he’s a horrible person?So the challenge now is to find a way for Julia to still end up falling in love with Robbie even though her fiancé isn’t really a bad person and isn’t really someone that one should dislike and hate.
This can be a difficult feat to accomplish, but it’s not impossible. Unfortunately, The Wedding Singer doesn’t manage that at all and that’s the problem with Glenn.
Glenn transforms into a horrible person
Glenn seemed like an all right person at first, but then his character just quickly turned into someone that was completely horrible. He had no qualms cheating on Julia.He didn’t seem to care about her or even love her like when he didn’t even look the least bit concerned or worried when she got drunk.
How in the world did Julia fall in love with Glenn?
It was these kinds of things that really made Glenn such a bad character that viewers will have to wonder what Julia saw in him in the first place and why in the world she would even think about agreeing to marry him especially since it was established that she wasn’t marrying Gulia for the money.All this served to make the audience dislike and even hate Glenn. But it also makes some question Julia’s decisions.
And you just can’t help but think that Glenn is characterized in this way just so Sullivan would have a reason to want to leave him and to start falling in love with the wedding singer who was an infinitely better person when compared to Gulia.
That just makes the film fall flat though because it’s like the plot has to make one of the characters bad just to make the other character stand out more.
Do you think it’s possible for Glenn to be portrayed as a pretty nice guy, whom Julia could have easily fallen in love with, while still being able to get her to eventually fall in love with the wedding singer?
*Notes:
- Image with added text was modified by Freya Yuki (CC:BY-SA) based on the image by CoDLia (CC:BY-SA) from deviantArt
- Image is meant to represent Julia and Glenn since the figures in said image appear to be a couple and yet they don’t seem close at all with the way they’re standing beside each other but aren’t touching or holding hands
- Second pic is from Amazon.com; link shown above
- YouTube video features a short scene from The Wedding Singer