Plot
A socially awkward, overweight, naïve "ugly duckling", who is obsessed with the music of ABBA, Muriel Heslop (Toni Collette) is the target of ridicule by the more fashion-conscious girls she considers her friends. She also is a perpetual daydreamer who yearns for a glamorous wedding and marriage to a man who will help improve her personal life and free her from a tedious life dominated by her demanding and often psychologically abusive father Bill (Bill Hunter), a corrupt politician who verbally lashes out at his subservient wife Betty and their unambitious children at every opportunity.
After Bill discovers Muriel has used a blank cheque to steal money to finance a vacation at a tropical resort, she leaves her family in the coastal town of Porpoise Spit, Queensland to set up house in Sydney with her carefree, hedonistic friend Rhonda (Rachel Griffiths). In Sydney, she follows her dream, only to discover life's realities. Although ostensibly a comedy, Muriel's Wedding deals with serious issues. The overriding theme of following one's dream is regularly punctuated by scenes depicting the disappointments and loss of self-esteem that frequently accompany the quest.
Read more about this topic: Muriel's Wedding
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“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)