72 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
Julianne Moore, Billy Crudup, and Michelle Williams in Bart Freundlich’s film.
THECURRENTCINEMA
HUMANITARIANS
“After the Wedding” and “Cold Case Hammarskjöld.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
ILLUSTRATION BY CLAIRE MERCHLINSKY
L
ess than twenty minutes into Bart
Freundlich’s new film, “After the
Wedding,” I got the giggles. What kind
of audience reaction Freundlich had in
mind is hard to say—something sternly
giggle-free, one imagines—but movies,
now as ever, have the darnedest knack
of missing their emotional target.
What happens, in this case, is that
Isabel (Michelle Williams), an aid worker,
flies from India, where she helps to run
an orphanage, to New York. She is bank-
ing on financial assistance from Theresa
( Julianne Moore), the founder of “the
biggest media-placement company in
the United States.” Things are pretty
busy for Theresa, what with her daugh-
ter, Grace (Abby Quinn), getting mar-
ried at the weekend, but she makes
time for Isabel, who sits down and
launches into her pitch about the youth-
ful poor of India. “There are over two
hundred thousand child prostitutes in
the south alone,” she says. “Five times
that number suffer from malnutrition.”
Theresa is in the middle of replying,
when her assistant interrupts and says,
“I have the caterers on the line. They
want to know if they can use mussels
and shrimp in the risotto. There’s a lob-
ster shortage.” And that, I’m ashamed
to say, is when I lost it. Other than ar-
ranging for a giant boxing glove with
the words “BITTER IRONY” stitched on
the front to come bursting out of the
cinema screen on an extendable arm
and whop me on the nose, there’s not
much more that Freundlich could do
to signal his intentions.
Is that lack of subtlety heightened,
or soothed, by the fact that two such
subtle actresses are involved? You can
sense Moore and Williams fighting to
break through the blockade imposed
by the screenplay, in search of fresh and
agile feeling. At the beginning, for in-
stance, we find Isabel meditating be-
side an Indian temple and caring for a
little boy—nearly eight years old and,
needless to say, adorable—whom she
has practically adopted. Then, in haste,
she is whisked away, courtesy of The-
resa, to a Manhattan hotel suite, which
includes a “Carrara marble bathroom
with a deep-soaking tub and a rainfall
shower.” Once more, we are meant to
bridle at the world’s outrageous inequal-
ity; but so adept is Williams that her
character’s quiet, unangry bewilderment
at the change of circumstance rings true.
Theresa invites Isabel to the wed-
ding. Nice offer. Bad idea. No sooner
has Isabel arrived at the ceremony, which
takes place on a sylvan estate, than her
past rises up to engulf her. For Theresa,
unbeknownst to Isabel, is married to a
famous sculptor, Oscar (Billy Crudup),
whereas—hang on, this gets tricky—
Isabel, unbeknownst to Theresa, used
to be the lover of Oscar, years before.
And all of the above is unbeknownst
to Grace, who, in her speech at the
wedding feast, delivers a panegyric to
her parents for their total fabulosity,
and whose life is about to be upended.
Frankly, so much unknowing is being
dished out here that nobody’s going to
have room for the risotto. (Lobster, by
the way. Thank God for something.)
As plots go, the notion of old flames
meeting by chance, with an option to
rekindle, is scarcely unprecedented. In
François Truffaut’s “The Woman Next
Door” (1981), Gérard Depardieu and
Fanny Ardant shake hands, in polite
company, and she gives him one of
those holy-smoke-it’s-you looks which
the French, for some reason, can hold
longer than anyone else. More searing
still is the opera-house sequence in Max
Ophüls’s “Letter from an Unknown
Woman” (1948), which finds Louis Jour-
dan, in white tie and tails, crooning to
Joan Fontaine that he’s seen her some-
where before. (Damn right he has. She
bore his child.) A moment of heavy
recognition, freighted with implications
for what comes next—anagnorisis, in
classical tragedy—isn’t easy to swing
these days, and the tremulous tragi-
comedy in which Ophüls dealt has all
but vanished. What remains, in “After
the Wedding,” is a kind of gulping em-
barrassment, as the protagonists try to
reckon with the big reveal. Twist fol-
lows twist, until you don’t know whether
to laugh or cry. Again, I went for the
laugh, but other viewers will, no doubt,
make the more honorable choice.
“After the Wedding” is based on a
Danish movie of the same title (in trans-
lation, anyway), directed by Susanne
Bier, and nominated for an Oscar for
Best Foreign Language Film in 2007.
The tale, as she told it, was purposefully
