After the Wedding           2 ½ stars

When I was at Sundance last year one of the hottest tickets was for Bart Freundlich’s movie After the Wedding.  I could not score a ticket for it there so finally caught up to now.  The movie is a complex family drama with a plot that is a little too involved to fully explain here.  It is actually a remake of a 2006 movie of the same name from Denmark.  The two main characters are Isabel (Michelle Williams) and Theresa (Julianne Moore). Isabel is a dedicated humanitarian who is part of the staff for a large financially strapped orphanage in India.  Theresa is head of her own media company and is very well off.  The orphanage is contacted by Theresa’s company saying they want to make a substantial contribution to the orphanage, but in order to go through with it, Isabel must travel to New York to meet with Theresa.  The two meet at a very short and terse meeting when Theresa invites Isabel to stay longer and attend the wedding of her daughter, Grace, which she does.  It is at that point, after the wedding that all the drama starts as it is realized that Isabel and Theresa’s husband, Oscar (Billy Crudup) had a previous relationship years earlier and everybody’s world is turned upside down.  The movie is a story of family relationships and people’s choices and their consequences, showing how little control we have over our own lives.  The parts played by the two main characters are done very well by two actresses that I admire a great deal.  I saw the original Danish version back in 2006.  In that movie the two leads were men, so in the remake they were made female characters.  I can remember being more interested in the story with the male characters than I was this time.  It is still a very emotional drama, but I preferred the original version.