My Life in Ruins, starring Nia Vardalos, looked same the perfect choice for an expat movie review: American-Greek classical person takes a job at Athens University, gets downsized, does a stint as a tour guide. Perfect!

big-fat-greek-wedding-movieWell, not so much. Great idea, good cast which includes Richard Dreyfuss, one of my all-time favorite actors, but not so well executed. The writing is schmaltzy and heavy handed, the plot is predictable, and outside of a few gorgeous shots of Hellenic ruins, the movie pretty such falls flat.

But seeing Vardalos, who is a reasonably good actress, of course got me intellection about My Big Fat Hellenic Wedding, which she wrote and starred in. Originally I hadn’t planned on reviewing it since the admirer is not technically an expat, but seeing My Life in Ruins got me intellection about it in a whole new way.

In My Big Fat Hellenic Wedding, Vardalos plays Toula, the younger daughter of Hellenic immigrants in Chicago. Her parents, the expats, live in their own Hellenic bubble of kinsfolk and culture. They run a restaurant – Greek, of course, called Dancing Zorba’s – and extended kinsfolk is part of their everyday lives in ways that seem quite, well, foreign. As Toula explains:

I’m Greek, right? So, what happens is,.. see, you have two cousins. I have 27 first cousins. Just 27 first cousins alone. And my whole kinsfolk is big and blasting and everybody’s in each other’s lives and business all the time. Like you never meet have a time alone meet to think ’cause we’re always unitedly meet eating, eating, eating. The exclusive other grouping we know are Greeks, drive Greeks marry Greeks to breed more Greeks to be loud, breeding Hellenic eaters. No one in my kinsfolk has ever gone discover with a non-Greek before. No one.

Toula’s father insists:

There’s two kinds of people. Greeks, and everybody else who wish they was Greek.

Toula was brought up inside the Hellenic bubble her parents created. She had tried to break discover of it as a youngster, but dark-haired Toula and her moussaka for meal were unloved and teased by her blond-haired, Wonder-bread sandwich-eating schoolmates.

When we first meet her, Toula tells us:

I wish I had a different life. I wish I was braver or prettier, or meet happy.

But she’s not. Working in the kinsfolk restaurant, rebelling against but unable to pull absent from the Hellenic community, Toula is miserable. She explains:

Nice Hellenic girls are supposed to do threesome things in life. Marry a Hellenic boy, attain Hellenic babies, and feed everyone. Until the day we die.

She wants more discover of life. She convinces her father to let her (at the geezerhood of 30 she needs his permission!) take a machine class at the community college so she crapper meliorate listing curb at Dancing Zorba’s. Her first real foray into US culture happens at the college when she joins a table full of blond-haired, white-bread-sandwich-eating young women in the cafeteria.