The Wedding Planner‘s Unhinged Dumpster Meet-Cute Is Still One of the Trope’s Most Entertaining Examples

The Wedding Planner exists in an alternate universe. It’s a universe where Jennifer Lopez not only plays an Italian woman, Mary Fiore, but one where she also wears pastels and hot pink lip gloss—all anomalies. Mary nerds out over her Scrabble matches (it’s how her parents learned English after moving here from…Italy), but she’s also hip to the latest trends for her job as a wedding planner. Everything about Adam Shankman’s debut feature feels just a little off; it’s strangely wrong in an ethereal way, fit only for the rom-com genre. As The Wedding Planner celebrates its 20th anniversary, it’s time to catch up with two rom-com legends (J.Lo and Matthew McConaughey, of course) and unpack some of the film’s unearthliness.
The rom-com is about Mary, a wedding planner who helplessly falls for one of her clients, Steve (McConaughey). Whereas there might be some leeway in other work relationships, romance with a client is usually prohibited in the wedding business—because, obviously, they’re engaged. Adding to the many surreal elements of The Wedding Planner is Mary and Steve’s meet-cute, which feels like it could be stripped straight from a superhero movie’s introductory action sequence. A helpless civilian, stranded in the middle of the street. Impending danger headed her way. A handsome stranger bound to catch her breath and save her life in one charming swoop. The Wedding Planner’s meet-cute is one of the finest specimens of the trope, primarily because the bizarre sequence feels like something straight from a fever dream. Because what’s a meet-cute, if not incredibly surreal?
Mary and Steve’s romantic fate all comes down to one pesky ice cream cone. Mary, always the workaholic, breezes across town with her phone attached to her ear, chatting up her coworker Penny (Judy Greer). She dons a pastel purple dress with a beige overcoat—again, something J. Lo would never wear—and, notably, brand new Gucci heels. Caught in a world of wedding planning, as always, Mary’s too busy to notice a huge dilemma headed her way. As she dashes across a hilly San Francisco street, her little heel slips into a grate. No, not her new Gucci shoes! In agony, she crouches to fetch the shoe from the grate, but it’s too stuck to retrieve.
Planted in the middle of the street, trying to yank her shoe free, Mary has naively put herself in grave danger. While I’m no San Francisco expert, this looks like a major road. There are no cars headed her way, yet there’s bound to be one soon. But even if there were a car coming, a driver could stop, honk or yell out the window before ramming into J.Lo, ever the shoeaholic. So The Wedding Planner raises the stakes: Instead of a car (which has brakes) headed her way, it must be a large, unstoppable inanimate object. Like a dumpster.