In Defense of George Banks

Recently I rewatched the classic 1990 comedy Father of the Bride starring Steve Martin as the iconic George Banks. It’s the hilarious tale of a dad stressed out to the max over his daughter’s expensive wedding.

Now, in the past, I’ve always sided with the mother and the daughter in the story. Annie, George’s daughter, spends a semester in Rome where she meets Brian McKenzie, the “independent communications consultant” who proceeds to sweep her off her feet, propose with a flea market engagement ring, and in doing so, shatters George’s fatherly illusion of Annie as a little girl who is completely his.

Granted, George has a lot to learn (or unlearn) in the movie. He has to let his daughter go. Both the goodness and pain of parting ways with your beloved daughter is the main message of the movie. However, when I watched the movie again, I realized something strange: I sympathized with George Banks.

The movie insists that George is the foible of the story. He resists Annie’s marriage the second she announces it. First, it’s on principle. “You’re too young to get married!” he declares over the dinner table, to which Annie responds, “Too young? Dad, I’m twenty-two.” During this exchange, George’s cool and steady wife, Nina, affirms Annie and reminds George that she was even younger than Annie when they got married. George even appeals to Annie’s supposedly fierce individualism, noting that she once claimed that marriage meant a woman “loses herself.”

Annie and Brian’s story turns out to be mushily romantic. It’s a love at first sight kind of tale, and Brian, foregoing the custom of asking the father for Annie’s hand in marriage, proposes to her before they even land back in the States. I’m a single man in my twenties, but even I felt myself getting a little miffed. She’s marrying a guy her parents have never met. What father wouldn’t be a bit perturbed?

However, Annie’s starry-eyed romance and her father’s comically exaggerated suspicions of Brian as an unemployed potential con-man aren’t what caused me to side with old George. It was when the checkbook cracked open.

Pretty soon it’s evident that Nina and Annie are all in for a rather extravagant wedding, although they claim they aren’t asking for anything “too fancy.” When George gives his suggestions for a reception of picnic tables, grilled burgers, and jugglers, they gape at him. Later, when they enlist the ethnically ambiguous “Fronk” to coordinate the wedding, George is looking at 250 dollars a head and basically a remodel of his house to accommodate the reception party. In addition to that, they order swans. Swans! “Nothing too fancy” turns into the equivalent of a typical American collegiate education: some $200,000 of expenses, all said and done.

It’s also remarkable how, in comparison to the Banks’, Brian’s family are the wealthy ones. But the McKenzie gang doesn’t seem to chip in a dime for the wedding. It’s a simple fact: George Banks is paying loads of money for a wedding that was sprung on him unexpectedly. It’s his money and it’s his house. Can we blame him for being dour?

George Banks represents the commonsense man who laments that we spend so much time and money on weddings and yet spend so little of our resources thinking about marriage itself. We throw thousands of dollars for a few hours of celebration but spend next to nothing in preparing young people for marriage—the thick and thin of doing life together as a team.

This isn’t to say that George Banks is the one who begs the young couple to ask honest questions about what they’re getting into. His response is reactionary. He’s the dad who doesn’t want to let his daughter go. But his resistance to the fluff and pomp of the wedding preparations is indicative.

The movie shows how so much of the wedding preparation and the party itself is procedural, the stuff wealthy people do because they can, and yet so little of the focus seems to be on the couple and the meaning of the decision they’ve made to spend their lives together. The wedding, then, isn’t about the marriage that will (hopefully) long outlast the glitter and swans. It’s about signaling wealth and status.

But perhaps it goes even deeper than simply wedding infatuation and the flat, confused marriages that ensue. Today, fewer people are getting married, period. In a sense, we don’t have George Banks’s problem. He had to get used to his daughter growing up and moving on. Today’s twenty-two-year-olds, however, seem little interested in either. Today’s dads are trying to get their kids to stop being kids and grow up.

In addition, though, maybe these two things are related. In focusing so intently on the wedding and not developing a positive vision for marriage itself, people opted out of the institution. We don’t know what it is or what it’s for.

For the Zoomer who watches Father of the Bride today, she might wonder, “Marriage at that age? Is she insane?” And then after a hesitation: “Wait, why get married at all?”

However, if they wait until the end of the film, they might just get an answer. The final scene in Father of the Bride shows George and Nina slow dancing together in the foyer of their house after the wedding guests have all gone. The house is a mess from the party, with furniture in disarray, streamers and food plates laying scattered. But the older couple chooses to get up, wearied as they are, and maintain their marriage, even after their only daughter has flown the coop.

That’s the real beauty of the movie—while of course we wish Annie and Brian the best, it’s George and Nina who have the real success story and show what marriage could be: a lifelong, loving covenant. It’s not the flash, the youth, or the feeling that make a strong relationship, but the daily choice to be vulnerable and put another person’s good before your own. That’s how the movie ends, the image we’re left with, and it’s a good one.

Today’s youth need to see proof that marriages can last decades, and that the data shows that being married and having children leads to greater life satisfaction. Healthy marriages lead to flourishing children and strong societies. It’s not the wedding day, but the anniversaries, that count. And as journalist Jim Dalrymple writes, being married and having  family is better than being “cool.”