Something like deja vu takes hold during the opening shots of Donald Rice's debut feature, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding. With the insistent, urgent push of orchestral strings in the background, he offers up establishing shots of a bucolic English country manor, early 20th-century automobiles, and a bell ringing down in the servants' hall. That feeling of anticipation rising in many viewers' chests may be their hearts readying themselves for the tense post-Victorian drama of the popular TV series Downton Abbey, which is what that opening rather too directly recalls.
What follows seems just as aimed at a shared audience, with its lush period settings, passive-aggressive wit and even Elizabeth McGovern turning up to play, as she does on Downton, the mother of a family seemingly always poised just on the edge of social disaster. (Her daughters, in another Downton echo, possess a remarkable flair for the dramatic.)
The titular wedding is that of older daughter Dolly Thatcham (Felicity Jones), and as the extended family gathers at the house for the happy occasion, she is holed up in her room, being dressed by her ladies' maid, getting drunk on rum and reading Tolstoy's Family Happiness, a title as ironic to her own situation as it was to the author's story.
The primary cause for her anxiety arrives in the form of Joseph (Luke Treadaway), a handsome young professor with whom Dolly had a fling during the preceding summer. But he left town at the end of the season, and Mrs. Thatcham sent Dolly off for a continental vacation, where she met — and quickly became engaged to — family friend Owen. He's sturdy, steadfast and, it's suggested, just a little bit dull. Dolly's heart is with the more romantic Joseph, but he's absent and unreliable; his feeble attempts at emotional sabotage on her wedding day are far too little and way too late.
This poorly timed romance is the drama that drives the film, and yet Joseph and Dolly have but two present-day scenes together. Their summer dalliance is sketched out in dreamy flashbacks, with cinematographer John Lee giving these sequences the golden glow of idealized memory. But with so little interaction during the bulk of the movie, Rice's story, adapted from a 1932 novella by Julia Strachey, ends up spending as much time on the kooky antics of the family before the wedding.
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Much to the chagrin of Dolly's mother (Elizabeth McGovern, right), Dolly's feelings imperil the plans she has for her daughter.