Star Rating:

112 Weddings

Director: Doug Black

Actors: Doug Black

Release Date: Friday 13th June 2014

Genre(s): Documentary

Running time: 95 minutes

As ideas for low-key but ingenious starting off points for a documentary, this one is pretty high up there. Documentary director Doug Black was a part-time wedding videographer to help him survive financially while his documentary career was waiting to take off, and has now decided to look back over the one hundred and twelve weddings he documented over the last twenty years, reuniting with some of his favorite couples to see how their marriages are holding up over the years.

Shooting between talking-head interviews with the couples (if they are still couples) today with footage of the happiest days of their lives is kind of basic stuff though, with very little in the way of revelations to be found throughout.

There are some sources of entertainment nuggeted away, with some of the couples being so brazenly – sometimes painfully – honest with the camera placed in front of them, saying things out loud that they may have felt for years, but their partners may not have heard or even realized. Then there’s the times when Black asks some serious, personal questions about their relationship, and we get a lot more from their silence than anything they might have tried to vocalize.

When talking about the practical realities of a wedding over the practical realities of a marriage, it gets a little topical and interesting, but more often than not, it’s just couples telling us how long term relationship can be, y’know, hard sometimes. Facing the problems that pretty much every couple has faced some variation of, it might soothe some to know that these issues are universal, but anyone with any kind of common sense or social awareness will already know everything that 112 Weddings has to say.

In an institution that ends in failure half the time, it makes sense that a film about the institution only ends up half as good as it should’ve been.