Cheerful Weather For the Wedding Review

• 27th Jan 2013

Period Drama? Check! Wedding Movie? Check! Happy Laura? No check. Anyone who knows me will be particularly shocked by that last point. I love a good wedding film; in fact I love a bad wedding film more. You know those dead cheesy ones like The Wedding Planner and Bride Wars. On top of this I’m totally obsessed by Downton Abbey and with Elizabeth McGovern playing the lady of the house a combination of the two should be an absolute winner in my world. Sadly, Cheerful Weather For The Wedding just isn’t.

We join Dolly Thatcham (Felicity Jones) on the morning of her hastily arranged wedding day, hiding away in her bedroom making her final preparations before walking down the aisle and immigrating to Argentina. The selection of family buzzing around downstairs take British stereotypes a bit too far to be believable or even very likeable. However, Mackenzie Crook and Fenella Woolgar play Dolly’s cousins Nancy and David Dakin brilliantly. They are the couple that don’t want to be at the family wedding and are purely there bound by duty. They bring a welcome bit of comic relief to the proceedings.

The 1930’s wardrobe was fabulous though and I was terribly jealous of her beautiful wedding dress but even that wasn’t enough to improve my opinion of this film. I just couldn’t understand the point of it. When it was over I felt like I’d just watched a random episode of some ITV drama that I haven’t been following. It was easy enough to understand the basic premise but the finer points were somewhat missing. I felt like I wasn’t privy to all the information and as a result I couldn’t become emotionally involved and just genuinely didn’t care whether she ultimately married her fiancé or ran off with her old flame.

Old flame, Joseph Patten, was played excellently by the rather dashing Luke Treadaway though -a very slight saving grace. His big emotional outpouring towards the end is a spectacular display but was just too little too late.

On top of this film being totally disappointing I found myself thoroughly confused by the DVD menu. Once I eventually found the extra features I discovered there was only an audio commentary that I couldn’t bring myself to listen to because it meant watching the film again and a behind the scenes featurette that didn’t do much to excite me either.

Laura Johnson