‘After the Wedding’ invites soapy plot twists
A remake of the Academy Award-nominated 2006 film of the same title from director-co-writer Susanne Bier (“Bird Box,” “The Night Manager”), Bart Freundlich’s “After the Wedding” casts Michelle Williams in the Mads Mikkelsen role. She is Isabel, a devoted worker, meditation teacher and yoga practitioner in a cash-strapped orphanage in India, who must travel overseas to New York City, instead of Copenhagen, to meet with a rich financier who offers to donate a large sum of money to the orphanage in exchange for the mandatory meeting.
Opening scenes set in India make it clear how desperately the orphan children need help, food, housing, affection and an education, and how devoted and almost saintly American Isabel is. Isabel has a very special bond with a young boy at the orphanage, who she found as an abandoned infant on the side of a road. In a teary-eyed scene, she swears to return from her trip in time for his birthday. Really?
In New York, Isabel is put up in a vastly expensive penthouse suite and invited to meet her super-rich benefactor Theresa Young (Julianne Moore) at the Manhattan headquarters of the corporation Theresa is about to sell for an enormous sum. Almost offhandedly Theresa invites Isabel to the wedding of her daughter Grace (Abby Quinn).
The wedding is that weekend and Grace has reservations about it and her obviously inappropriate, soonto-be husband Jonathan (Alex Esola). Theresa’s husband Oscar (Billy Crudup), meanwhile, is an acclaimed artist-sculptor checking up on his latest installation. He has a very close relationship with Grace in part because he was her single father before he met and married Theresa. The couple also has a pair of young twin boys.
Freundlich’s “After the Wedding” takes place in a universe that makes the rich people in a Nancy Meyers film look like paupers. Theresa and Oscar’s home in what looks like Connecticut is a big compound bordering a bay, where a fireworks display has been arranged for the wedding guests, and you just know there’s a stable of horses somewhere.
Bier’s version of “After the Wedding” was co-written with frequent collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen (“Brothers,” “In a Better World”). Both films have elements of soap opera, especially coincidences, shocking revelations and things that are both. Well, Hardy and Ibsen liked them, too.
Freundlich, who adapted the screenplay by Bier and Jensen, adds a snobby dig at New Jersey to the mix. I’m sure Manhattan-raised Freundlich, who is Moore’s husband, has never set his entitled foot there.
That is Quinn singing a song she composed over the credits. Moore, who has appeared in Freundlich’s “Trust the Man” and “The Myth of Fingerprints,” is a bit “The Devil Wears Prada”-like as Theresa, dressing down a subordinate, looks as if she’s trying to will herself to disappear. As the meek-seeming, but surprisingly strong-willed Isabel, Williams is equally fine, and the two tussle amusingly in the film. But people may find the twists and series of life-altering reveals and unveilings a bit, well, rich.
(“After the Wedding” has an obscene number of shocking reveals.)