Editor’s Note: Vanyaland’s Nick Johnston is out in Utah all week long covering the 2019 Sundance Film Festival; click here for our continued coverage from the fest and also check out our official preview.
I’ve never seen Susanne Bier’s Mads Mikkelsen-led 2007 film After the Wedding, but after witnessing its English-language remake which premiered as the opening night film of this year’s Sundance, I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to. Indeed, Bart Freundlich’s adaptation is stuffed with pretty much everything I hate about modern melodrama — its mistaken profundity, its convoluted story — and is only prevented from being a colossal failure by the skills of its four leads, each of whom should provides a clutch save worthy of Mariano Rivera, given the depth of its collapse. It’s an exhausting and frustrating movie, convinced of its own greatness and meaning, which only amplifies how bad everything is.
Isabel (Michelle Williams) runs a struggling orphanage in India, where she is beloved by the children that she helps, but, despite her best efforts, isn’t able to keep the organization above water without help from outside benefactors. She’s asked to come to New York by one of these wealthy people, an incredibly successful CEO by the name of Theresa (Julianne Moore, who is Freundlich’s wife), where she’s been promised that she’ll receive a large sum of money for the organization. Theresa surprises her by delaying that finalization of their deal upon her arrival, and, instead, invites Isabel to the wedding of her daughter Grace (Abby Quinn), which is taking place that weekend. She accepts, believing another required hoop to jump through in order for her to get the money, and heads upstate. Upon her arrival, Isabel recognizes Theresa’s husband, Oscar (Billy Crudup) as her former lover, and realizes, based on the ages of all involved, that he never actually gave up the daughter they had together for adoption like he promised, and that the woman getting married is, in fact, her own child. Cue the arguments about selling out and being a do-gooder phony and the yelling and the tears, because we’ve got ourselves a drama with thematic aspirations on its hands!
There are plenty of moments in which the leads are able to wring some recognizable human emotion out of their characters — Crudup’s teary eyes as he reveals to his daughter why they decided to call her Grace, Williams’ stomach-churning anxiety at being thrown into this situation, Moore’s concealed depression — but they’re all crushed firmly under Freundlich’s screenplay and its utterly bizarre plot mechanics, most of which have been lifted and gender-flipped from Bier’s original. Seriously, this thing might have one of the most convoluted melodrama plots since The Book of Henry, though it’s not nearly on that weird, campy level.
Instead, Freundlich is content with his film being boring instead of downright infamous, and some of that convolution can be blamed on the gender-flipping, given how much easier it is to conceal, say, a child being born without an absent father’s knowledge than it is for a mother — having given birth to the damn kid — not finding out that her ex-partner didn’t give the baby up for adoption after he said he would. Even then, there’s a further twist down the line that pushes the entire ensemble outside of the realm of normal human behavior, which causes its own amount of tear-ridden histrionics from the leads. Perhaps all of this might have been acceptable if any of the ideas raised by the writing were engaged with at all, but beyond a cursory barb thrown here and there in an argument nothing ever lands.
That said, it’s not nearly as easy to watch as some disasters of this caliber in the past few years, given how slowly the film is paced, and it makes you feel each and everyone of its 109 minutes before After the Wedding finally ends. It’s an overlong episode of This Is Us, designed to extract those sweet, sweet tears from your ducts, but with none of the mendacious oddity of something like Life Itself. What a colossal waste of time.
Follow Nick Johnston on Twitter @onlysaysficus. Featured image courtesy of Sundance Institute; photo by Julio Macat, ASC.