AFTER THE WEDDING
Here comes the remake…
Julianne Moore scored a bullseye earlier this year with Gloria Bell, an English-language remake of Sebastián Lelio’s 2013 Chilean hit Gloria. She’s less lucky with this flat, if finely cast, family melodrama, reworked (and gender-swapped) by Moore’s husband Bart Freundlich from Susanne Biers’ Oscar-nominated 2006 Danish weepie.
Michelle Williams’ earnest aid worker, Isabel, is whisked from a cash-strapped Indian orphanage to New York to secure a $2m donation from Moore’s media mogul, Teresa. Scooped up into the lavish wedding of Teresa’s daughter, Grace (Abby Quinn), Isabel finds her past threatens to detonate Teresa’s picture-perfect family. But Freundlich smooths the edges off Biers’ darker, spikier original, creating a sentimental drama that endlessly contrasts Teresa’s thoughtlessly lavish New York lifestyle with Kolkata’s teeming street-child poverty.
Despite its twisty plotting, the TV-movie dialogue and distanced playing make the family scenes surprisingly short on emotional heft. Meaty themes about what mothering and ‘goodness’ really mean get trotted out, but are only fleetingly explored. Williams’ cool, contained Isabel is finely understated, torn between fleeing a rich family’s first-world problems and scoring vital funding. Yet she’s outgunned by Moore’s broad and tender performance as Teresa, a woman wrestling to stay in control of her life, in an echo of the bravura heroine of Still Alice. Only Moore can crack the film’s well-mannered facade, in a piercing scene with longsuffering husband Billy Crudup that shows up the plush restraint all around it. Kate Stables
THE VERDICT
A melodrama more tasteful than tearjerking, showcasing Williams and Moore well.