After The Wedding (2019)

Synopsis:  Isabel (Michelle Williams) has dedicated her life to working with children in a financially struggling orphanage in Calcutta. One day she receives news that a wealthy New Yorker,Theresa (Julianne Moore), wants to make a large donation but only on the conditions that Isabel comes to New York in person .

I can understand remaking a bad film but why would you remake a good one?  Likelihood is you’re setting yourself up to fail. And if the film that you’re remaking is very good you’re really tempting the gods. This is exactly what Bart Freundlich has done and he has only himself to blame for the outcome.  Perhaps had he actually made an English language version of Danish director Susanne Bier’s 2006 After the Wedding he might have gotten away with it but Freundlich decided to gender-reverse the original, replacing its two male leads, Mads Mikkelsen and Rolf Lassgard, with Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore (who just happens to be Freundlich’s wife). Bad move!

Had Freundlich regenerated the screenplay to take into account the fact that women have different sensibilities to men and so behave differently his film might have been interesting. Instead he leaves the screenplay by Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen largely intact but shoehorns Williams and Moore into roles which not only were written for men but played with compelling intensity by Mikkelsen and Lassgard. 

Almost needless to say, the film doesn’t work. As we know, both Williams and Moore are good actors but through no fault of their own they fail to convince here as the dual father-daughter relationship so central to the original falls by the wayside to be replaced by two tepid mother-daughter pairings. Where the original offset two females against two males, here we end up with three females and one male. The dynamic is all wrong leaving Billy Crudup, never the most animated of actors, with little to do. (And that’s not even questioning the credibility of  his character, a sculptor who initially appears to make decoratively abstract metal works but eventually ends up with a big lump of stone which rather risibly, albeit no doubt completely unintentionally, suggests Tony Hancock’s would-be bohemian rebel).

One of the strengths of Bier’s film is the way that the plot cleverly explores the complexities of relationships, delving into the protagonists' personae with insight. Here the revelations are awkwardly delivered with no real sense of the characters' organic discovery, of self or others. With remarkable hamfistedness, Freundlich introduces the lame motif of a bird’s nest to suggest (I assume) the nurturing support of the nuclear family and where Bier’s film benefited from its adherence to the no-frills Dogme aesthetic he swamps the story with swooping and tracking camera work and plush picture book visuals of Theresa’s country abode and Manhattan office.

One could go on endlessly finding fault with Freundlich’s film but suffice it to say that everything that is bad about it  is what he has changed of the original. What’s good is what he has not. If you haven’t seen Bier’s original this version will probably be more bearable but do yourself a favour and seek out its predecessor. You’ll be much better off.

 

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