Trigger warning: Extreme, sob-inducing nostalgia.
Last night at roughly midnight ET, Nancy Meyers took to Instagram to temporarily ruin the lives of 103,000 people. With no warning, the writer-director behind unimpeachably perfect films like The Holiday and It’s Complicated posted a video of a live orchestra playing the score from Father of the Bride, the 1991 film starring Steve Martin and Diane Keaton that marks one of Meyers’s first screenwriting credits. It also probably marks the first time your entire family sat down in front of what is ostensibly a happy film and open-mouth sobbed together. “Someone just sent me this 30 year old Behind the Scenes footage of a scoring session from #FatheroftheBride. 😢,†wrote Meyers in the post, indicating that she knew exactly what she was doing, i.e., completely upending the fragile emotional state of everyone who happened to be on Instagram at that hour.
The score is an eight-minute slice of magic that somehow evokes the following all at once: old-timey weddings on crinkly black-and-white film, Christmas, nervous apprehension, unmitigated joy, that chest-aching feeling you get when you look at your parents and notice they’re getting a bit gray around the temples and realize that one day everyone you love will die, that thing when you walk into your childhood bedroom and now it’s a gym and it’s fine and you get it but it still kind of stings, falling in love, the realization that the ’90s were definitely bad but they felt better at the time because we were younger and the government was better at faking us out about how well things were going and it was easier to throw a dinner party, Michael Jordan, getting the perfect amount of drunk at a fancy party with good lighting where somebody is playing the tuba for some reason, getting a blender as a gift, the experience of taking a walk through the woods when it’s just beginning to snow, puffy VCR cases, remembering that Nancy Meyers is not currently working on another movie and getting extremely upset, thinking about how sweet little movies like this are rarely made anymore, holding a baby in your arms and wondering at the fragility of the human experience, the wrenching unfairness of time, and Diane Keaton’s bangs.
Next, Meyers posted another musical clip from the film — the original recording of Steve Tyrell singing “The Way You Look Tonight,†which plays when George Banks (Martin) looks warmly across the room at his family, filled with impossible love. At this point in the Instagram spree, Meyers is no longer pretending that she wasn’t attempting to send all of us directly to our pillows, where we would then weep uncontrollably for the duration of the evening. “Now I’m sobbing out loud,†she wrote. Commenters both famous and not weighed in to confirm that they, too, were utterly destroyed. “Now I have to go to bed, bawling my eyes out,†wrote one commenter. “Full on tears,†wrote another. Lindsay Lohan weighed in with a prayer-hands emoji and a heart. Personally, I listened to the score three times and cried so hard I had to do a few laps around my apartment to feel better. But I’d like to think we all briefly suffered for a reason: Nancy, if you’re reading this, make another freakin’ movie! The world needs you!