My Big Fat Greek Wedding Cultural Review
My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a movie focusing on the cultural disparities between the white Americans and the Greek immigrants. The movie is a comedy often exaggerating and caricaturizing different aspects of the Greek culture.
The movie starts with the protagonist, a Greek woman named Toula Portokalos, falling in love with a white American teacher Ian Miller. She starts to date him soon after but after her big, noisy family finds out about the relationship her father, Gus, is enraged since he cannot accept a non-Greek as part of the family. He tries to make Toula fall in love with a Greek man, but failing that begrudgingly accepts Ian after he gets baptized in order to marry his daughter. At the wedding ceremony Gus makes a speech: ““Portokalos, means orange in Greek. And the root of the word Miller is Greek and means
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For the most part, the Greeks are presented in a light-hearted, humorous way. The film focuses on the aspects of the Greek culture that can be exploited for the comedic effect. For example, Gus keeps talking about every word, including the Japanese “kimono”, having Greek roots. He also uses a widespread Greek saying: “When we invented democracy, you were hanging from the trees”. That treatment of the culture has been seen as derogatory by some Greek-Americans. Professor Agathi Glezakos has called the movie “degrading” and accused it of treating Greeks as animals. The worst example of such treatment is the depiction of Toula’s grandmother who only communicates through body language and occasional short phrases. The movie also shows Toula’s family drinking a lot of ouzo – a traditional anise-flavored alcoholic drink. Overall, the treatment of the Greek culture in the movie is inelegant. All of the aspects and peculiarities are exaggerated and overplayed, resulting in a crude depiction of the foreign