My Big Fat Greek Wedding
“My Big Fat Greek Wedding” is a charming romantic comedy that explores cultural differences in a combination of adorable romance and cute humor. The story revolves around Toula, a thirty-year-old Greek American single woman, who lives with her family in the suburb of Chicago. Like many obedient Greek daughters, she works in her family’s business, a restaurant called “Dancing Zorba’s.” Toula belongs to a traditional collective upbringing where all good daughters are expected to marry from their ethnic background. However, she struggles with her father’s limited ambitions for her and she longs for something else in life. She enrolls in college and takes computer classes. With the computer diploma under her belt, a rebellious Toula emerges. She manages her aunt’s travel agency and starts dating Ian Miller, a white high school English teacher. They date secretly for a while, before she has the courage to introduce him to her family. Her father is livid over her dating a non-Greek. The climax of the story occurs when both sides try to adjust to each other. While Ian has to let go of his rigid white individualistic upbringing and learn to accept her collective big family and Greek traditions, Toula has to come to terms with her own identity. My Big Fat Greek Wedding not only exposes the cultural difference between the individualism of Ian and his family and the collectivism of Toula and her family, it also offers a wide array of misconceptions in interpersonal communication. Collectivism and individualism, culture and language and culture's influence in the development of the self concept are highly visible in every scene of the movie. Language in itself has its own way of functioning, but when it is influenced by our cultural upbringing, another dimension of communication takes place. It is something that involves the use of devices as formality and informality; precision and vagueness; and brevity and detail. And in terms of verbal communication style, as it