When Michelle Williams can’t quite get an emotional grip on a character, you know there’s something amiss. In After the Wedding, Williams plays Isabel, whom we first meet in India, where she helps run an orphanage. She heads to New York City for a meeting with Theresa (Julianne Moore), a successful entrepreneur who’s dangling a seven-figure donation to the children’s home. The wedding of the title is for Theresa’s daughter, Grace (Abby Quinn). Isabel attends and is dumbfounded to encounter Theresa’s semifamous avant-garde artist husband, Oscar (Billy Crudup, on cruise control), with whom she has a history.
The movie’s series of grand revelations involving these characters will be familiar to anyone who saw Susanne Bier’s 2006 Danish film of the same name, in which the Isabel and Theresa characters were men, connected by a woman. The gender swap makes perfect sense in this remake, adapted and directed by Bart Freundlich (Moore’s husband). But his at-a-distance filmmaking — replete with unnecessary drone shots — and dull dialogue don’t do justice to the fraught situation.
Moore’s role in particular is missing the poignancy it should project, leaving the actress cool and controlling but without the vulnerability necessary to make Theresa sympathetic. Isabel, on the other hand, is admirable but powerless — not a good fit for Williams, who was so volcanic in F/X‘s recent “Fosse/Verdon” miniseries. After the Wedding aims to knock you off your feet with its twists and Big Emotions, but it’s the movie that ends up stumbling to its finish.
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