After the Wedding

As it twists its way through much cloy­ing melo­dra­ma, Bart Freundlich’s After the Wed­ding feels more like an above-aver­age episode of Grey’s Anato­my than it does an emo­tion­al­ly coher­ent fea­ture dra­ma. This elab­o­rate tale of fam­i­ly secre­cy and bit­ter rev­e­la­tion is a gen­der-swapped remake of Susanne Bier’s 2006 film of the same name. The source mate­r­i­al is prime fod­der for an engag­ing tear­jerk­er, but this new film falls flat almost from the word go.

In a hur­ried open­ing we get a taster of what life is like in India for Isabel (Michelle Williams), a staff mem­ber at an orphan­age in des­per­ate need of fund­ing. She is a sur­ro­gate moth­er to the chil­dren, tak­ing a shine to one boy in par­tic­u­lar who craves her pro­tec­tion. It is his abject lone­li­ness that makes a request from her employ­er to trav­el to New York all the more painful, but the mon­ey the orphan­age relies on is depen­dent on the trip.

We then switch from India’s warmth to the clin­i­cal world of the New York elite and the life of There­sa (Julianne Moore), the mil­lion­aire bene­fac­tor Isabel must meet to agree the terms of their char­i­ta­ble busi­ness. Their first encounter sees Williams and Moore play out a terse but under­whelm­ing face-off, and their sub­se­quent meet­ings feel just as abrupt and shallow.

The rest of the film takes place, as the title would sug­gest, after the wed­ding of Theresa’s daugh­ter, Grace (Abby Quinn), with Isabel in atten­dance at Theresa’s invi­ta­tion. The reper­cus­sions of this plot point, the fam­i­ly his­to­ries that are exposed and rela­tion­ships that are test­ed, are best left unsaid, but from here the nar­ra­tive feels as rushed and under­de­vel­oped as all the slight­ly inane char­ac­ter interactions.

There is lit­tle feel­ing in the script and pac­ing, but the tal­ent­ed lead­ing actors, with a grav­i­ty in the soft­est of expres­sions, from dev­as­ta­tion to sheer deri­sion, sees to much of the emo­tion­al heavy-lift­ing. Ulti­mate­ly, how­ev­er, the women they por­tray are too car­i­ca­tured, and despite the actors’ work, the film drags cliché́s through a half-heart­ed schmaltz cloud of famil­ial upheaval and loss. Isabel, draped in fab­rics and with tat­toos of moon phas­es and man­dalas, has nailed the white-woman-in-India look, while There­sa car­ries all the signs of an over­worked busi­ness woman with too much mon­ey, down­ing vod­ka mar­ti­nis and fight­ing cater­ers for more lobster.

After the Wed­ding is a per­haps too con­cerned with its dichotomies, lack­ing a sub­tler, more nuanced explo­ration of the dis­tant lives of these two women. It box­es Isabel and There­sa into cat­e­gories of wealth, moth­er­hood and liveli­hood, pit­ting them against one anoth­er even as their lives become more woven togeth­er. For all the imbal­ances that the recent trend of gen­der-swap­ping in cin­e­ma hopes to cor­rect, here it seems to have a regres­sive, even trou­bling effect.

Their par­al­lel lives are a cause for com­pe­ti­tion and inse­cu­ri­ty, and the insin­u­a­tion that they owe each oth­er a solu­tion to their own pri­vate issues is uncom­fort­ably archa­ic. What either char­ac­ter is sup­posed to have learned from these inter­rup­tions to their lives remains unclear – instead they are left sti­fled and unful­filled, bound by oth­ers’ expec­ta­tions rather than their own choices.