REVIEWS
November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 59
Reviewed by Lisa Mullen
There ought to be a law that says you can have
either cancer or orphans in your manipulative
weepie, but if you try to sneak in with both,
some kind of klaxon goes off and you’re
banned from making another film until
your urine tests clean again. Really, though,
the manipulation klaxon would be blaring
pretty much non-stop for Bart Freundlich’s
demented melodrama, which not only takes
emotional blackmail as its central theme but
seems to argue that it is a fine thing in the long
run, because cancer. And orphans! But mainly
cancer, because that happens to white people.
The poor Kolkata orphans who seem so cute
in the swooping drone shot at the start of the
film are mainly there, it turns out, to frame the
incandescent virtue of Isabel (Michelle Williams),
a barefoot American with a pixie haircut and
a strong belief that she alone can save the sad
children of this vaguely sketched-in but definitely
non-Western locale. Her assumption is that
these definitely non-Western children must
surely perish without her personal American
touch, yet go she must, to horrid old luxury New
York, to collect a large donation from Theresa
(the always watchable Julianne Moore), a
wealthy businesswoman who has noticed her
valiant orphan-whispering and wants to help.
When she arrives, and after some
unintentionally funny culture-shock stuff
reminiscent of Crocodile Dundee (1986), Isabel
is invited to the lavish wedding of Theresa’s
daughter Grace (Abby Quinn), only to find that
her never-forgotten ex Oscar (Billy Crudup),
the lost love of her life, is father of the bride.
Learning that Grace is not Theresa’s biological
daughter, but was a babe in Oscar’s arms when
the couple first met, Isabel suddenly slaps her
forehead and remembers that she and Oscar
had a baby 20 years ago, who was put up
for adoption just before Isabel left for India.
Could 20-year-old Grace possibly be...? You
bet she could, and that’s not the half of it: we
haven’t even got to the cancer yet! Phew! It’s a
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
The title’s a touch misleading. There’s nothing
specifically American about the experiences
Debra Callahan (Sienna Miller) goes through, nor
about her impulsiveness, her vulnerability or her
resilience. But by placing her in a deftly sketched
working-class community in small-town rust-belt
Pennsylvania (though the film was in fact shot
in Massachusetts) and surrounding her with a
voluble, critical, squabbling and loving family,
screenwriter Brad Ingelsby and director Jake
Scott (son of Ridley) have given us an indelible
portrait of a woman struggling, and eventually
succeeding in her struggle, to survive the events
that threaten to overcome and destroy her.
Early on, in a moment of warm intimacy with
her teenage daughter Bridget (Sky Ferreira), Debra
responds to the girl’s wish that things could
“go back to the way they were” by telling her
that they won’t, but “you make do with what’s
left”. Which is exactly what Debra is forced to
do after Bridget disappears, gradually fighting
her way through grief, excess drinking, suicidal
impulses, dead-end jobs and a succession of
ill-chosen men – and emerging into something
close to equilibrium. The grief, though, never
leaves her, for all that she learns to live with
it. It’s there etched into her face when, in a
scene startling in its confident economy, she
finally confronts the man responsible for it.
Miller, American-born and raised in Britain,
throws off the ‘supportive wife’ roles she’s too
often been assigned in recent years (Foxcatcher,
The Lost City of Z) and takes impressive control
of American Woman, seamlessly inhabiting
Debra with all her emotional ebbs and flows, her
transient joys and equally transient tantrums,
while charting the hard-won maturity that, by the
film’s ending, she has finally managed to achieve.
But that’s not to diminish the contributions
of her supporting cast, especially Christina
Hendricks as her sister Kath, Amy Madigan as
their mother Peggy and Will Sasso as Kath’s stolid
but supportive husband Terry. The frequent
and often vituperative family rows, and the
equally effusive reconciliations, feel all too real.
The timeline takes some unheralded leaps.
From Bridget’s disappearance, and the fruitless
communal search for her, we jump seven years
into the future to find Debra and Bridget’s son
Jesse oppressed by authoritarian live-in
boyfriend Ray (Pat Healy). Then, after Debra
good thing Isabel knows all about meditation
and other definitely non-Western things.
Pause here to wipe the soap from your stinging
eyes, and consider that this film is a remake of a
2006 Danish film (Susanne Bier’s Efter brylluppet),
but with the sexes of the main characters
reversed. In the original, the errant parent was
the father, and the question of why he might not
know he had a daughter answered itself; here, the
film must go through convolutions to explain
the situation, and we are left with the suspicion
that Isabel has a peculiar hinterland that we are
being asked to ignore. The adoption angle could
have made for an interesting psychological study,
but unfortunately there’s so much scenery to be
chewed that there’s no time to develop any of
the characters, including (most fatally) Isabel’s.
Instead, we are left with an uninflected
depiction of a woman with an unsavoury
white-saviour complex, which unfortunately
the film seems not to question but to share.
‘Charity’ exists here to provide a convenient
moral upgrade for grubby Western souls – if
you can afford it. Meanwhile, the agency,
even the identity, of the Indian characters is
brusquely erased or diminished, swept away
by white tears and the gigantic entitlement
of both Isabel and Theresa. The film’s top-
notch cast are let down badly enough by the
clunking screenplay, but they are entirely
defeated by the ethical vacuum at its core.
After the Wedding
Director: Bart Freundlich
Certificate 12A 111m 46s
American Woman
USA/United Kingdom 2019
Director: Jake Scott
Certificate 15 111m 48s
India, present day. Isabel, an idealistic American,
runs an orphanage in Kolkata. When she learns that
a rich benefactor, Theresa, wants to donate millions
to her operation, she reluctantly goes to New York
to seal the deal. At the lavish wedding of Theresa’s
daughter Grace, Isabel is shocked to see her old
flame Oscar – and to learn that he is now Theresa’s
husband and Grace’s father. Later we discover that
Grace is not Theresa’s biological daughter, but
Isabel’s. Grace is the unwanted baby she and Oscar
supposedly signed over for adoption 20 years ago.
Theresa knows this and has engineered the visit
to New York – she will bankroll the orphanage as
long as Isabel stays in the US long-term. Secretly,
Theresa is dying of cancer, and wants Isabel to be her
replacement. Initially incensed at being manipulated,
Isabel finds that she is drawn, after all, to the prospect
of a relationship with her long-lost daughter. She
decides to stay, travelling only once more to India to
say goodbye to the children she used to care for.
Produced by
Joel B. Michaels
Julianne Moore
Bart Freundlich
Harry Finkel
Producer
Silvio Muraglia
Written for the
Screen by
Bart Freundlich
Based on the film
Efter Brylluppet/
After the Wedding
(2006), screenplay
by Anders Thomas
Jensen, story by
Susanne Bier, Anders
Thomas Jensen
Director of
Photography
Julio Macat
Editor
Joseph Krings
Production Designer
Grace Yun
Music
Mychael Danna
Sound Designer
Dave Paterson
Costume Designer
Arjun Bhasin
Production
Companies
Ingenious Media,
Riverstone Pictures
& Rock Island Films
present a Joel B.
Michaels production
In association with
Magaritz Productions
and Fortysixty
A film by Bart
Freundlich
Executive
Produced by
Nik Bower
Deepak Nayar
Andrea Scarso
Peter Touche
Vaishali Mistry
William Byerley
Alison Thompson
Mark Gooder
Anders Kjærhauge
Sisse Graum
Jørgensen
Peter Aalbæk
Michael Caton-Jones
Bill Koenigsberg
David Brown
Chayah Masters
Cast
Julianne Moore
Theresa Young
Michelle Williams
Isabel
Billy Crudup
Oscar Carlson
Abby Quinn
Grace Carlson
Alex Esola
Jonathan
Susan Blackwell
Gwen
Will Chase
Frank
Eisa Davis
Ta n y a
Azhy Robertson
Otto
Tre Ryder
Theo
Anjula Bedi
Preena
Vir Pachisia
Jai
Kaizad Gandhi
Jaques
In Colour
[2.35:1]
Distributor
Vertigo Films
Saccharine charity: Moore, Williams
Credits and Synopsis
Land of the lost: Sienna Miller
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Reviews, 2
