Muriel's Wedding (1994)

Muriel's wedding is a sham, a staged, set up display designed to further the false goals and aspirations of a sad group of people so enamoured with winning and getting ahead that they forget to care.  In the beginning of the film Muriel is a down-and-out unemployed girl with no self-esteem who is constantly belittled by everyone around her, so she feels the need to act out, lying and stealing to live the ideal of a life she sees her peers living and appease her greedy, success obsessed father.  Eventually she meets a friend from school and they move in together and they think they're free but things go wrong again and her friend his rendered paraplegic due to a tumor in her spine.  Another blow and Muriel, ever desperate to live up to the idea of success, sees it in marriage, her new ultimate goal, overlooking her friend in favour of a phoney wedding to a professional swimmer so he can get citizenship because she's so desperate to be somebody and feels as if she has nothing, when she always had all she ever needed but was blind to it and had to learn through the suicide of her long suffering mother who always stood by her and believed in her no matter what but was ignored at the wedding as she grinned for the cameras.

Muriel's Wedding is a great film because unlike other "cinderella stories" this completely subverts that idea and dodges every cliche because it's not about success, it's about failure, or the failure in success.  In the end Muriel and her friend finally break free of it and ride off to live together but they don't really gain anything, they simply accept themselves and give up.  Most of the characters end up worse off than they began, and while portrayed comically, none of them are villains, and instead all seem just as sad and desperate as Muriel, her thieving, lying timidity just a symptom of the bind denial that afflicts them all.  Her father is an abusive, greedy, status obsessed businessman who tries repeatedly to run for governor, her siblings all sit around watching TV and doing nothing, her peers are all image and sex obsessed bitches and her mother, plain, simple and wanting for nothing, is caught in the middle of it all and when her own daughter ignores her because it she eventually has enough and self-destructs.  He leaves her for some glamorous, well-to-do woman he keeps meeting "coincidentally," and she's in just as much of a prison as the rest, who all need to make noise and shout about how great they are by the standards of a sick society that seems so loud and purposeful and keeps grabbing and taunting but is only an outward symptom of self-hatred.  

It's a great film, full of great characters and the ABBA soundtrack compliments it wonderfully.  Toni Colette is excellent as Muriel and the whole cast is great.