License to Wed (2007)

License to Wed arrives from the summer of 2007, a moment when a studio romantic comedy could still be assembled from the following parts: a church, a reluctant groom, a wedding deadline, and Robin Williams performing at the outer edge of his improvisational range. Ken Kwapis directs with the efficiency of a man who has television in his bones, and the result is a film about a clergyman who subjects an engaged couple to robot babies, bedroom surveillance, and a prohibition on premarital sex. The premise is thin. The reviews were worse.

The cultural inventory here is meager. The cast is white to an almost architectural degree, with DeRay Davis supplying comic relief in a supporting slot and a Latina character surfacing late as a plot device rather than a person. That late twist, in which Reverend Frank reveals his former marriage existed to secure an immigrant congregant's legal status, gestures toward immigration without ever commenting on it. It is a reveal, not a position. Sadie's lifelong dream is a church wedding, and the film treats that dream as both inevitable and admirable, offering no scrutiny of the institution it spends ninety minutes celebrating. Reverend Frank does sermonize, at length, but his moralizing concerns chastity and marital readiness. Nobody in this film has a political argument to make.

What remains is a conventional romantic comedy with a creepy officiant, a B+ CinemaScore, and a healthy return on a modest budget. It predates the era in which studio comedies began carrying visible social freight, and it shows no interest in retrofitting itself. We classify it accordingly: a period piece from a less self-conscious time, notable chiefly for the fact that its minister is more unsettling than most horror antagonists and that nobody involved appears to have noticed.