The Wedding Year is a 2019 comedy about a young woman who is put to the test when she and her new boyfriend go to 7 weddings in the same year.
Mara (Sarah Hyland) is hopelessly upbeat but equally cynical young woman working at a women’s fashion boutique, convinced love is out of reach. She’s a flighty and self-indulgent but approachable, landing a date with Jake (Tyler James Williams) an inspiring chef doing his best at a local diner. As things go in such a story though, they are then invited to a number of sudden weddings planned over the next year. That means Mara must commit, something way out of her wheelhouse, but as the wedding’s pile up behind them, she begins to change.
You know how you go to a greeting card store because you have to, and spend way too long looking over stacks of all the same sentiments, wondering if there is anything out there a little different than the rest? It’s the same feeling you get while watching director Robert Luketic‘s latest The Wedding Year, a film that is so transparent you’ll barely notice it. Plotted along a storyline that is both weirdly implausible and yet even more weirdly obvious, it piles on the generic like salt on bland soup. You won’t even believe how much so.
Stepping in giant footsteps laid out by dozens upon dozens of other wedding-themed romcoms, there is absolutely nothing here you’ve not seen before, with Mara a frenzied flibbertigibbet stuck in the usual ruts, who pals around with her gay friend Alex (Matt Shively) – he himself having trouble with love – trying to figure out what to do with her life, which for her is only about the next twelve months. The film tracks this through all the hoops and hurdles you’ve already got swishing about your brain, tackling it all with kid gloves and a bubbly soundtrack.
Yes, Hyland is effervescent, as the screenplay demands, giving what she can to the paper thin character she’s tackling, Mara wildly distracted by her own life and whatever she can get from it. This is a character molded for all the trappings of a wedding movie and as such, the film leaves her mired in plenty with so many on the docket, it’s almost ridiculous. There’s a check list of scenes that a girl like Mara must experience in a wedding story and she goes through them all diligently. I suppose one shouldn’t expect any surprises, this kind of movie designed, produced, and manufactured as a throwaway product, and surely, it will temporarily satisfy those who consume such easily digestible cinematic calories. It’s heartily acted and pleasant to look at, but vacant of any significance.