‘Table 19’ Review: Anna Kendrick Wedding Comedy Is Uneven, But Avoids Crashing

For a good while, the film threatens to be as forced as an unwanted attendee, and as forgotten as the types of guests it focuses on, until it rallies toward the end with an easy sweetness and comedic warmth it had been lacking for too long.

[...] that makes it not terribly unlike the trajectory of many weddings, save the most common reason those rites become enjoyable: alcohol.

Writer-director Jeffrey Blitz has shown a fondness for misfits before, in both his Oscar-nominated spelling bee documentary “Spellbound” and his fiction feature debut, the 2007 debaters-in-love indie “Rocket Science.”

Ten years later Kendrick is front and center of Blitz’s “Table 19” as Eloise, a young woman whose churning indecisiveness about attending her oldest friend’s wedding is such that she checks off, crosses out, and re-checks the “accept” and “decline” boxes enough times that she ultimately decides to light a match to it.

Driven by hurt, jealousy and, it’s later revealed, a truly pressing personal issue, Eloise is the kind of tough-but-vulnerable bundle Kendrick and her expressively downturned mouth were born to play, even if the script initially doesn’t do justice to her comically tense situation beyond having her flirt with a handsome crasher (Thomas Cocquerel), bicker with Teddy, and create a cake mishap.

(The pratfalls are numerous and laugh-free.) But when it settles down into something like an indie ensemble about disappointment and the comfort of strangers, Blitz finds a more effortless tone, and even manages a few well-played surprises that bring genuine heart to the uptick in Eloise’s fortunes.