THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 73
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.rough on the eye, with a stack of hand-
held shots; Freundlich has smoothed
it out and rejiggered the genders. In
the original, it was a man named Jacob
(Mads Mikkelsen) who cared for chil-
dren in India and travelled westward,
seeking funds, before stumbling, like Is-
abel, into personal trauma. Not to give
too much away, but his plight struck me
as rather more convincing than hers.
There are basic implausibilities in the
new version, and it’s only the dedicated
intensity of the performers that sees the
movie through.
How would it fare, I wonder, with a
role swap? One can easily picture Moore
(who is married to Freundlich) as the
half-hippie type, fleeing America for a
life more sustaining to the spirit, and
though I’ve never witnessed Williams
play a corporate animal, I’m certain that
she could do it. She can do anything.
Better yet, why not take a tip from Buñuel,
who repeatedly switched around his lead-
ing ladies during “That Obscure Object
of Desire” (1977), and ask Moore and
Williams to trade places, scene by scene?
That would cut down on the earnest-
ness, for sure, and keep us on our toes.
The most awkward aspect of Freund-
lich’s film is the way in which it flouts
its own rules. As Isabel confronts the
bountiful wealth on display at the nup-
tials, her expression shows us what she
thinks of the one per cent at leisure; oc-
casional flashbacks to her Indian home,
and to the little boy who awaits her there,
are designed to prick our conscience ac-
cordingly. On the other hand, the lon-
ger that “After the Wedding” goes on,
the more it concentrates on the woes of
white folk, to the exclusion of all else,
and you gradually realize that the Third
World, far from being a source of cul-
tural tension, isn’t even a backdrop to
minor domestic events on the East Coast.
It’s a pretext. This movie muses grace-
fully on its moral opportunities. In the
end, though, it plumps for the lobster.T
he Lone Ranger! Weaponized vi-
ruses! Real-life Rambo! Smoking
gun! Just some of the exciting phrases
to be heard in “Cold Case Hammar-
skjöld,” a new documentary from the
Danish director Mads Brügger. The
title tells us what to expect. In Sep-
tember, 1961, a plane bearing the U.N.
Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld,
crashed on approach to the airport at
Ndola, in what is now Zambia. Pilot
error was initially blamed, but rumors
have always rumbled around the di-
saster, and Brügger makes it his busi-
ness to dig for an explanation.
He is not the first to do so. There
have been various official investigations
of the crash, the most recent being a
U.N. report that was submitted to a
later Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon,
in 2015. Books have proliferated, from
Arthur L. Gavshon’s “The Last Days
of Dag Hammarskjöld” (1963) to “Who
Killed Hammarskjöld?” (2013), a sober
inquiry by Susan Williams. What does
Brügger bring to this crowded field?
In a word, he brings Brügger. Seldom
is he offscreen for long, and, when he
does appear, he is often eccentrically clad.
Combing the crash site with a metal
detector, he sports a pith helmet—a
cliché of colonialist attire, and not that
funny, given the record of Western ex-
ploitation in this part of the world. We
also watch him dictating his narration
to two black female typists: an uneasytableau, to say the least. After a while,
he simply tires of Hammarskjöld and
wanders off on a tangent, as if to feed
a craving for conspiracy. There’s noth-
ing wrong with documentarians tak-
ing center stage in the drama of their
own research, as the career of Werner
Herzog demonstrates. The trouble with
this ploy, however, is that you have to
be Herzog, or a figure of comparable
charisma, to pull it off.
So, was it a bomb that felled the
plane? A second plane, flown by a Bel-
gian mercenary? Why was Hammar-
skjöld’s body allegedly found with
an ace of spades tucked into his shirt
collar? Was he killed by persons who
wished to preserve white-minority power
in newly independent African nations?
Or, specifically, by those who planned
to spoil his brokering of a ceasefire in
the Congo? That was the dogged and
difficult cause that brought Hammar-
skjöld to Ndola in 1961. “The hardest
thing of all—to die rightly,” he once
wrote. For novices, the film will serve as
a lively, if annoying, introduction to the
Hammarskjöld mystery, yet there’s a sad-
ness here. The more we are encouraged
to puzzle over the darkness of his death,
the less heed will be paid to his illumi-
nating life. The pipe-smoking Swede of
noble blood, who surprised everyone
with his tough-minded pursuit of high
ideals, was mourned by John F. Ken-
nedy as “the greatest statesman of our
century” and by W. H. Auden as “a great,
good, and lovable man.” Brügger, by con-
trast, calls him “a goofy character from
a screwball comedy.” Take your pick. THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2019 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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