For this critic, there are few things more stimulating to unpack than a movie that has all the elements to succeed and balks. After the Wedding, a well-equipped redo of the 2006 Danish melodrama from director Susanne Bier, is one such curious dud. It places two outstanding actors, Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore, in sparring roles previously occupied by men: Mads Mikkelsen and Rolf Lassgård, respectively. Billy Crudup plays the sweetheart at the point of their triangle, a woman (Sidse Babett Knudsen) in the original. Moore’s real-life husband, filmmaker Bart Freundlich, carefully directs and adapts the twist-filled story originally cowritten by Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen. But while Bier and Jensen’s jagged little film was a popular and critical coup, netting an Oscar nomination in 2007 (for Best Foreign Language Film), the smooth and glossy remake falls flat.
This patina of actors playing house might have cracked with more danger and pathos, or a thrum of anxiety that mounted with each surprising turn, but no. For the most part, the characters’ reactions are muted, and the fallout of each betrayal or disagreement seems mild. A welcome prick of electricity between Oscar and Isabel during their first scene together is duller in their next, and practically dead in subsequent interactions. One mordant exchange between Theresa and Isabel late in the narrative hints at what the film could have achieved with more nerve. Unfortunately, the deficit of palpable drama boils down to the fact that the plot was in motion before Isabel arrived, and given the circumstances, continues to its tidiest possible conclusion.
Directed by Bart Freundlich. PG-13, 110 min. In wide release.
