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One of the notable tonal peculiarities of the movie is exactly
how Havana is supposed to come across. The scene is set for a
fish-out-of-water story where the reluctant outsider ends up dis-
covering aspects of themselves in a strange environment they
wouldn't have otherwise and come out happier, if not wiser, than
they were before. I found myself thinking throughout the mov-
ie that it was so close to being a gender-flipped parody of Peter
Weir's Witness (1985) that the filmmakers just needed to commit
a little bit more in that direction for it to stick (that film is also a
key example to invoke for folks who mistakenly assert that Har-
rison Ford can't act, but I digress). Except this never really hap-
pens. There isn't much distance between Arquette's turn here
and the utterly amoral femme fatale played by Linda Fiorentino
in John Dahl's neo noir The Last Seduction, released the same
year. Granted, Holy Matrimony is a comedy, but when the pro-
tagonist is situated as an anti-heroine at best, it would seem that
the script would need some reconfiguration. Alas, such a recon-
figuration was not considered. There are a couple of moments in
the movie's eleventh hour where we are supposed to believe that
Havana has developed some kind of emotional bandwidth, but
by this point it's hard for it not to ring hollow. This isn't helped by
the fact that most of the attempted character beats are situated
around jokes about a marriage with a preteen.
A noteworthy bit of trivia is that this film was Joseph Gor-
don-Levitt's sophomore feature film appearance; he made his
feature film debut in 1992 in another Montana set-and-shot pic-
ture, Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It, where he plays
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