Father of the Bride Part II (1995)

Father of the Bride Part II arrives four years after its predecessor and roughly one pregnancy after its emotional climax, which is to say it is a film built entirely on the premise that the Banks family has more room in its heart. George learns his daughter is expecting, then learns his wife is expecting, and spends nine months being buffeted by contractors, termites, and his own mortality. The result is a domestic comedy of the softest possible texture, content to let Steve Martin's narration carry us from one anxious set piece to the next. Roger Ebert called it warm and fuzzy, and he was being generous in the right direction.

The film's cultural ledger is thin and, in one entry, embarrassing. BD Wong appears in a minor supporting role, and the rest of the cast is a study in beige. More notably, the Habib character, the buyer who acquires the Banks home, is a caricature so broad that the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee cited the film in 1997 as an example of Disney perpetuating negative stereotypes. That is not a diversity credential. It is a liability, and the decades have not softened it.

There is a moment where George doubts a young female obstetrician, and she corrects him by noting she has delivered hundreds of babies. It is a small, satisfying beat, and it is also the film's entire engagement with the social questions of its era. The house sale and the hundred-thousand-dollar buyback are treated as sentimental stakes, never as an occasion to interrogate wealth. The pregnancies are milestones, not statements. A proposed third installment involving a same-sex engagement never came to pass, which leaves us with a warm, harmless, and largely unexamined piece of mid-nineties comfort.