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BY CHRIS HEWITT
Pioneer Press
Found here
In "Wedding Crashers," there's a classic Vince Vaughn moment. Informed of a creepy sexual encounter, he reacts with appropriate disdain. But his character is also a horndog, so he immediately flips it around and asks if the woman involved in the creepy encounter was hot.
The ability to turn on a dime ��� to find the sweetness in a silly moment, the sadness in a joke ��� is a trademark of Vaughn's performances in movies such as "Dodgeball," "Old School" and "Swingers." And it's there in "Wedding Crashers," too, in which he plays a guy who, along with a pal played by Owen Wilson, hangs out at weddings because they're good places to pick up chicks. It's a raucous comedy, but Vaughn's character is more complicated and likable than your average sex comedy lecher.
"One of the things that makes the characters likable is they're excited," says Vaughn. "They love to eat the cake, they love to dance. They elevate the wedding. They don't ruin it ��� it's more fun because they're there."
That kind of analysis is why Vaughn's characters have more staying power than, say, Adam Sandler's. Vaughn's characters are just as funny, but they make sense as characters. You understand why they behave in the often gross, frequently stupid, ultimately lovable ways they do.
Vaughn ��� who chats for half an hour without ever acknowledging the weird fact that he's sitting in front of the headboard of a hotel room bed that has been removed so there will be enough room for him to stretch his lanky frame ��� says his instinct for character comes from improvisation. Raised in suburban Chicago, Vaughn took classes at the famed Second City improv theater, and he generally helps reshape scripts for his movies: "A lot of the dialogue we rewrite right before we shoot it."
"You want to make it seem like it all �Ķ was improvised," says Vaughn, adding that improvisation should not be about finding jokes but about finding the character. "If you're going to just improv, it might be funny, but at what great cost? You may lose the story."
It's a balancing act between comedy and reality, and there's a similar balancing act in Vaughn's physical presence. He's basketball-tall ��� 6-foot-5 ��� but he conducts an interview slumped low in a swivel chair. He's well-dressed in a tailored gray shirt and gray pants, but the shirt flies open at the waist to reveal belly. He seems a little shy, but his eye contact never wavers. His conversation is laid-back, but it's accompanied by wild hand gestures.
Vaughn's hands really start flying when he's excited about a scene that works. Like, for instance, at one of the weddings in "Crashers," when an invited guest seems on the verge of unmasking Vaughn and Wilson as impostors. Wilson freaks, but Vaughn remains calm, faking a friendship with the guest and pushing it to the point of semi-fondling him.
"My job in that scene is that my friend has done something that makes us seem bizarre," says Vaughn animatedly. "So I have the burden of plugging the dam. It's one of those weird things where (the semi-fondling gesture) is inappropriate but also comfortable. Only someone who knew you would touch you with that intimacy."
The other thing that keeps Wilson and Vaughn from being discovered is this: Who would want to crash a wedding? It makes sense to drop in uninvited on a kegger or a VIP party with the members of Coldplay, but who wants to see people they don't know pledge eternal devotion in front of hundreds of other strangers? Vaughn says his character's wedding-philia is what makes him so easy to love.
"Weddings have that feeling of optimism," says Vaughn, who says he has been a bad luck charm at weddings ever since he was the best man for a cousin who later divorced. "It's the fairy tale potential of love forever after."
And it's true ��� that's part of the message of the R-rated "Wedding Crashers." But, since it's a Vince Vaughn movie, the fairy-tale-potential-of-love stuff is balanced with: a. comic bondage, b. Jane Seymour taking her top off (as the lecherous mother of the bride), c. laxative abuse and d. a sense that, whatever you just saw in the last scene, the next one is bound to feature something completely different.
Posted by Christine at July 17, 2005 10:16 PM