My Big Fat Greek Wedding - Essay Example

Fatoula ‘Toula’ Portokalos, the central female character in the movie, is a thirty-year-old Greek American from a middle-class family that runs its own restaurant business. She is thirty but feels conflicted between the expectations of her traditional Greek family and the individualistic American society. Her family expects her to marry a Greek man and raise children. His father is over-patronizing, according to Toula, as he refuses to let her pursue further education in a computer academy. She manages to achieve it with the help of her mother and eventually takes up an office job and stops working at her family restaurant.

Toulaa, played by Nia Vardalos, undergoes sea change in terms of her looks, grooming, and fashion in the meantime. At the same time, she falls in love with a young Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Ian Miller, who is a school teacher, played by John Corbett. Toula’s patriarchal Greek family, especially her overbearing father, refuses to accept their relationship and Ian agrees to be baptized as a Greek Orthodox Christian, which earns the family’s approval. The families get introduced and the couple gets married eventually.

The movie is a portrayal of ethnic identity, romance, and interaction between cultures. For example, while almost everyone in Toula’s large extended family interferes in wedding planning, Ian is surprised at just the size of her family and the number of cousins she has. Especially when the two families come together and interact, the differences are more evident. For instance, Ian’s nuclear family is surprised to see that every single person from Toula’s extended family is present at the introduction which makes it a big party. Read More