Cheerful Weather for the Wedding Review

Do you ever feel like you’re just reading about yourself?” asks Felicity Jones’ bride-to-be in Cheerful Weather For The Wedding, Donald Rice’s melancholic comedy of manners. “Like it’s all in a book from the lending library, to be returned when you’ve finished.” That sense of disconnection, of passions spontaneously indulged and then put back on the shelf, pervades this between-the-wars period piece. The gloom that settles over the country house, plus the fact that the bride is locked upstairs swigging rum as the ceremony draws near, forecasts an unhappy union, for reasons that drift into focus once Luke Treadaway’s brooding traveler makes the scene.
Rice moves his camera fluidly through the assembled revelers, many of whom are in a less-than-celebratory mood. Jones’ perky younger sister Ellie Kendrick bemoans her ill luck with the opposite sex, and long-married Mackenzie Crook and Fenella Woolgar lob lazy snipes at each other, as if even their mutual dislike can’t get them worked up. Meanwhile, bridal mom Elizabeth McGovern works the room, mixing barbed comments and crisis management.