After the Wedding

After the Wedding

It’s rare to see a non-franchise story so twist-dependent that you can’t really talk about it without giving away everything important but “After the Wedding” is that movie. Michelle Williams plays Isabel, an American woman who runs an orphanage in Kolkata, India; Julianne Moore is Theresa Young, the wealthy American who has summoned her to New York with promises of becoming her organization’s biggest benefactor just as she is preparing to sell off the company she founded and cash out; Billy Crudup is Oscar Carlson, Theresa’s sculptor husband; this also happens to be the weekend that Theresa and Oscar’s daughter Grace (Abby Quinn) is marrying a nice young man named Frank (Will Chase). Complications ensue.

I’m already frustrated enough to bang my head against the desk at this point, so I’ll just spend a couple paragraphs talking about what I thought of the movie overall, in vague terms whether it sounds interesting from there or not will tell you whether it sounds like something you want to see before reading further and then get into why exactly it didn’t work for me.

“After the Wedding” was adapted and directed by Bart Freundlich from an original by Susanne Bier, and feels very much like one of those movies that would play at a film festival attended mainly by rich people who have summer homes in the town where the festival takes place.

Aside from bracketing sequences set at the orphanage (where Isabel has become a surrogate mother figure to an adorable little boy named Jai [Vir Pachisia]), most of it takes place among ultra rich Americans: mainly in Theresa’s glass and steel office building, or in the luxury Manhattan hotel where she puts Isabel up in a penthouse suite so large that each character could have their own floor if they wanted one, or on the grounds of Theresa and Oscar’s country estate, which is so extensive that at one point during the wedding reception, out of nowhere, it has room for a full-scale carnival complete with rides and games.

This is a Sad Rich People movie no more than a lot of American films going back to the dawn of cinema but it’s no “The Leopard” or “The Royal Tenenbaums” or “The Great Gatsby,” or you name it. It’s just fuzzy enough and fragmented enough that the opulence immediately swallows up Isabel’s perspective; she is set up as our guide through this story, the polite but appalled observer who rejected this world decades earlier.

The contrivances pile up rapidly: revelations leading to more revelations leading to confrontations and arguments. But they aren’t savored here, as part of a great melodrama or psychodrama. This movie is too tasteful for that. It often cuts away from potentially wrenching moments before we can have a proper wallow in them, then returns later, after the messy, volatile part has presumably occurred offscreen though not always.

(An early argument between Theresa and Grace over some news heard on TV one of several scenes where Moore flat-out acts circles around her younger colleagues seems designed to illustrate both characters’ flaws at once: The daughter is too quick to judge her mother without knowing all the facts; the mother tends to make everything about herself while pretending it’s about other people.) It’s the film itself that seems repressed here more than any of its characters, who sit on pain for what seems like not-unreasonable amounts of time and discuss their feelings plainly and mostly honestly.

(Theresa tells Oscar she wants him at their daughter’s side on her wedding day despite his resentments toward her because he’ll be less destructive if he feels included; Isabel tells Theresa that even though she finds many things about her insufferable, she can’t help but love her too, because she recognizes a lot of herself in her. It’s all very upper-crust European, along the lines of the kind of bourgeois French films that tend to find their way to however many arthouses are still left in the United States, although here there are no older male architects or composers with wives half their age and mistresses a third their age, nobody has sex, and nobody plays classical piano over a montage of people driving.)

And now we will discuss the plot details.

When Isabel arrived in New York, Theresa told her that the money for the orphanage was not a sure thing it was one of several options she was considering and Isabel is shocked by this revelation; later, we learn that Oscar is Isabel’s ex-boyfriend and Grace is their child together, whom Isabel thought was going to be given up for adoption. Isabel took off for India and Oscar changed his mind and kept the baby, eventually entering into a relationship with Theresa, who became a mother to Grace and had two more children (twin boys) with Oscar. On top of all this, Theresa has terminal cancer and only three months to live but doesn’t want her husband or kids to know because she wants them to be happy.

This is all very “An Affair to Remember,” whose three-hanky climax you can Google if you’re unfamiliar or don’t want to watch it yourself right now. There’s a powerfully shameless story about parents and children buried somewhere beneath these plot machinations; nature versus nurture plays out in scenes like when Grace shows Isabel how she skips rocks (the same way) or when Grace refuses to eat meat (like Isabel), never acknowledging that last year’s film “Lion” already did everything this one is trying so hard to do, but better. But there are so few scenes between Isabel and Grace, or Theresa and Grace, that this avenue goes almost entirely unexplored.

Also largely ignored are the cultural demands placed on women that make some wave away even the possibility of being good mothers maybe because they’re afraid they’ll get stuck giving up their whole lives for motherhood when they want other things too. The irony of Isabel escaping unwanted biological motherhood only to become an exceptional mother figure for dozens of orphans (in a setting where she makes the rules, on her own schedule) is beyond what the movie can handle intellectually, given its focus on the central trio.

There’s an excellent film buried somewhere in “After the Wedding” about how rich people are willing to manipulate others’ lives even those of the individuals they’re trying to help. People like Isabel practice a kind of public “generosity” and salve their unspoken guilt over being able to afford lobster for their daughter’s wedding while most of the world lives more like the orphaned kids whom Isabel loves so much.

But Freundlich’s script keeps skipping over that part. Williams, Moore and Crudup are terrific actors, and there are five or six notes of bitterness or regret that they play against one another or alone where their talent pops.

And there are nice little moments, like when Isabel tells Oscar that she looked up his artwork online and was shocked by how bad it is, or when Theresa orders for both herself and Isabel in a restaurant without asking if she wants anything (powerful people do this all the time without thinking twice; “Billions” hilariously skewers it). But the movie keeps racing past those kinds of sharp, true observations because it wants to get to its next bombshell twist, and its next muted, mournful tableau against a fancy backdrop.

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