Please note: this article discusses a key plot point from Muriel's Wedding
With all the hallmarks of a quirky Aussie comedy – and a Hollywood romance – even 30 years on, Muriel’s Wedding surprises with its layered narrative of self-realisation and the mother wound.
‘Do you ever think you’re nothing? Sometimes I think I’m nothing. Useless.’ So says Muriel Heslop, the flawed protagonist of the PJ Hogan Australian classic Muriel’s Wedding (1994), played to perfection by Toni Collette.
In the multitude of stories that explore the path to self-fulfilment and acceptance, this film stands out. It’s famously powered by the timeless sounds of ABBA, of which composer Benny Andersson has said 'even the happier songs are melancholy at their core' (as told to biographer Jan Gradvall). But it’s the simplicity, honesty and quiet realisation of moments like Muriel’s confession above that explain the film’s enduring success. This is a film that shows how it’s not the unknown or the hidden that takes us by surprise in our darkest times: it’s what we have known about ourselves all along but try to ignore. In Muriel’s case, what she shows to the world does not reflect what she truly believes about herself.
ABBA is the soundtrack for the highs and lows of Muriel’s Wedding. A scene from NFSA Restores: Muriel's Wedding (PJ Hogan, 1994). NFSA title: 1771411
Muriel is, in many ways, your standard rom-com heroine: flawed, self-sabotaging, and unable to confront her inner demons. She is also downright sneaky, taking things that don’t belong to her in pursuit of her goals. Her life needs a major kick-start if she is to escape her spiritless existence in the small town of Porpoise Spit. However, when we first meet her – desperately and excitedly clamouring to catch the bouquet at a high school frenemy’s wedding – she is the picture of joy.
It's not long before writer-director PJ Hogan masterfully reveals the holes in Muriel’s story. She appears to be wearing a stolen dress; the bridesmaids (whom she knows from high school) despise and bully her; and she still lives at home.
As Muriel returns home from the wedding in a cop car, humiliated, she retreats to her bedroom, the walls of which are papered with ABBA posters. While her well-connected father gets her out of trouble, a blank-faced Muriel puts on the soundtrack to her life: ABBA.
Muriel Heslop, despite being an adult, has the emotional maturity of an adolescent.
Most modern audiences would recognise the 'hero’s journey' narrative structure: a call to adventure that takes a hero out of their ordinary world into the unknown, meeting enemies and friends along the way. It’s the template for the Star Wars films, and it’s evident even in lighter fare, such as comedies and action flicks. In the hero’s journey, one faces their flaws and overcomes them for the greater good. The hero doesn’t come out the way they went in.
If the hero’s journey is a quest for adventure, it contrasts with the 'heroine’s journey', which is a pilgrimage within. This seems to cast away the very externally heroic, masculine mission and dives into the wounded feminine. It’s an inward exploration sustained by a desire to heal. It is an experience that gradually peels back the layers to expose the gaps in one’s existence – and how our relationships inform our character and our progress.
This is the throbbing heartbeat of Muriel’s Wedding. However, as Muriel’s journey unfolds, it becomes clear that physical escape is still essential to her embracing a life of greater purpose. Muriel cannot grow and transform so long as she remains in small-town Porpoise Spit.
On the surface, the film offers the lesson that fulfilment doesn’t arrive with a husband – or with anyone else in fact. What we truly need in life starts from within. Yet, Hogan’s rom-com is also very much a family drama that speaks to traumas of womanhood, of generational inheritance and sacrifice, and of potential unrealised.
Muriel feels incomplete, directionless and unfulfilled, but her home life also tells us that she comes from an unhappy family of similarly aimless individuals. Muriel’s mother Betty (a sublime Jeanie Drynan) is a broken woman, and her significance in Muriel’s unfurling should not be understated. She gets no respect from her family and seems afraid to even speak.
Muriel’s father Bill (played robustly by Bill Hunter) publicly admonishes his family. He disrespects Betty, he tells business contacts that Muriel is on the dole and lambasts her for being unable to keep a job. All the while, Bill is clearly in the throes of an extramarital affair. It also becomes obvious over the course of the film that he is not the highly respected councillor he pretends to be. Bill is all about appearances, just like Muriel.
As for her siblings, they are as adrift as Muriel. But her sister Joanie (an ebullient Gabby Millgate) at least delivers light relief with the now iconic line ‘You’re terrible, Muriel’.
Muriel’s sister joyfully delivers the famous reprimand, ‘You’re terrible, Muriel’. A scene from NFSA Restores: Muriel's Wedding (PJ Hogan, 1994). NFSA title: 1771411
Muriel’s flaws stem from these familial wounds. The limitations of a small-town existence have infected her family with a desire for cosmetic greatness. It’s no surprise then that Muriel believes the solution rests in ‘happily ever after’ and everyone knowing about it.
Where she seems most to depart from characters in pursuit of love in other films is in the complete absence of any clear preference. She wants a man to marry. Her vision consists of her as a feted, beaming bride. The groom is not clearly defined; he just has to exist. He simply must rescue Muriel from her dull life. From herself. When a good-looking, sweet man shows interest in her, she doesn’t seem terribly enthused, which tells us she’s not romantic, only aspirational.
Despite her parents’ broken marriage, Muriel’s goals are completely reliant on the dream of wedded bliss. She is not truly seeking her personal potential or meaningful evolution. She wants the appearance of it. And she will do anything to get it – like change her name to ‘Mariel’.
Even as she continues to obsess over becoming a bride, Muriel begins to experience genuine progress when she befriends another high school peer, Rhonda (Rachel Griffiths). Instead of simply losing herself to the sounds of ABBA, Muriel uses their music to step into her power. With Rhonda, she finds the courage to perform an ABBA routine in front of strangers and her frenemies. Muriel starts to blossom.
It’s because of Rhonda that Muriel finally moves out of home, gets a job and has a love interest. It’s Rhonda who exhibits unwavering loyalty to Muriel, who helps her to esteem herself. All of this is a nod to the power of authentic connections, long before Hollywood embraced non-romantic love – like the bond between sisters in Frozen (2013) and the friendship that blossoms between Glinda and Elphaba in Wicked (2024).
Muriel’s natural evolution is disrupted when she decides to be in a fake marriage with an Olympic hopeful, South African swimmer David (Daniel Lapaine). He needs citizenship. Muriel wants desperately to be a bride.
The result is the wedding of Muriel’s dreams: a beautiful dress, a full church, the high school bullies as bridesmaids. She ignores her mother and shows little remorse for abandoning a now wheelchair-bound Rhonda, who tells her plainly that ‘Mariel’ sucks – she’s not half the person Muriel was. Like her ‘friends’, David seems to actively despise Muriel. When he criticises her for marrying him without any love, she throws it back at him – he did too. ‘I want to win,’ he tells her. ‘Me too,’ says Muriel.
Muriel has manifested her deepest desires, but the result is an empty world. It is cosmetic success, not true alignment. She’s tied the knot but has no desire for love – just the appearance of it. She is not any closer, it seems, to healing her wounds.
The following paragraphs contain spoilers about the plot of Muriel's Wedding.
Betty is the greatest tragedy in Hogan’s excavation of the Aussie dream, and it’s her ending that leads to Muriel’s true awakening. When Betty takes her own life, she leaves behind a burnt-out backyard, the washing line intact; she has literally and figuratively scorched the earth.
A house, Hogan has shown us, is not necessarily a home. Muriel’s Wedding – a portrayal of love and hope – is also a dismantling of the Aussie dream.
The loss of Betty forces Muriel to face the truth: she has been shaping herself in the shadow of her father, a philanderer with skewed values. When she finally achieves genuine connection with David, she knows that it is not love she feels for him. She tells him she wants a divorce. ‘I tell so many lies. One day I won’t know I’m doing it.’
Betty’s death is the end of the lie that Bill is the centre of the Heslop family, and everyone revolves around him. It was underappreciated Betty, whose absence exposes the skeletons in the family’s closets. Without her, they are all lost. And in her tragic departure, Muriel finally looks within. The realisation isn’t about what is right or wrong, but what is authentic and true. It’s about experiencing life with true joy and connection, rather than ideas of a good life.
End spoilers
Muriel’s Wedding, with its bittersweet ending tells us that if you don’t heed the call to evolve and mature, and to relinquish control of your demands of life, nature will do this for you – and sometimes in the cruellest of ways. It warns us that the grand ideas we have about who we should be can dominate us more than who we truly are, holding us back from our true potential and a meaningful life.
The NFSA restoration of Muriel’s Wedding premiered at NFSA’s Arc Cinema in Canberra on 4 December 2024.
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Main image: Still frame taken from the NFSA Restores version of Muriel's Wedding. NFSA title: 1771411
More than three decades after its release, Muriel's Wedding continues to captivate audiences worldwide. Amal Awad speaks to the film’s writer and director, PJ Hogan.
We head back down the aisle for special celebration of Muriel's Wedding.
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.
