Can we just table ‘Table 19’?
“Table 19” is a comedy to the extent it can get laughs, and when it can’t — when writer-director Jeffrey Blitz gives up trying to make the characters amusing — the movie switches to trying to make us feel sorry for everyone onscreen.
The characters here are too pitiable to be funny, but not real enough to generate any genuine sympathy.
[...] the warning lights should be flashing.
First of all, going to a wedding when your ex is the groom? OK, now that could be funny.
Why then would two close and longtime friends become so estranged, on the basis of a rather routine benign breakup, as to exile one of them to the dreaded 19th table?
At the table is Lisa Kudrow and Craig Robinson as a married couple who own a diner, which the movie seems to think is the worst possible thing two people could do with their lives, akin to breaking rocks on a chain gang.
Kudrow and Robinson are funny people, but they’re playing two halves of a dead marriage, while saddled with a script that never makes us believe that their marriage ever was alive.
[...] we don’t really think they should be together, and soon we don’t think Eloise and the ex-boyfriend (Wyatt Russell) should be together, and it’s a good thing they don’t tell us much about the bride and groom, because that marriage is probably doomed, too.
June Squibb is also at the table, as the former nanny of the bride, so that’s another sizable comic talent wasted on bad material.
Stephen Merchant, the tall British comedian who often collaborates with Ricky Gervais, has a featured role, and he does get some good laughs through sheer force of will.
Having thrown these disparate discontented characters together, the movie has to do something with them.