This wedding scene drew a lot of criticism for being over-the-top and more burlesque than authentic. Well, those people clearly haven't attended enough weddings. In fact, the behavior displayed here at the wedding buffet table is tragically similar to what happened in real life at the reception following my father's funeral.
THE STUFF OF DREAMS:
I’m aware that many of the things I’m fondest of in Goodbye, Columbus (the music score by Charles Fox, the montages, the class-distinction humor, the appeal of Ali MacGraw) are the very things that don’t resonate very strongly with audiences today. Still, there is much in the uniformly fine performances and witty screenplay that makes me categorize Goodbye, Columbus as something of a neglected classic. If the film has any flaws, perhaps its biggest (and ultimately costliest) is in laying on the ethnic humor so heavily that some of the more thoughtful, perceptive points of Roth's novel are lost or at the very least, blunted.