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After the Wedding

directed by Susanne Bier

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Oct 29, 2023
Category: Drama

Americans are lucky. We’re spared war and famine and apocalyptic weather. What we’re not spared is a crazed white man with a gun who needs to kill 18 people before he kills himself, or a Speaker of the House who takes his political views from the Bible. In the face of these baffling events, what can Head Butler do to be useful to you? Short answer: movies. Romances. Love stories. Movies that celebrate touch and intimacy and humans trying, and sometimes succeeding, in connecting. Reminders that what we see and read — news we really can’t do anything about — isn’t nearly the whole story. And yes, I get the whole story — the personal story — is also fraught. For every man who gets a movie deal the week before his marriage — which happened this week for the son of a friend — there’s a friend who’s ill, and a job ending for another, and diagnostic tests for a third. So I made a list of movies I can commend to you, and then snuck in some music that becomes a movie if you close your eyes.

Where to begin Movie Week? My favorite 21st century movie, “After the Wedding.” I could cite the director (Susanne Bier), and the actors (Sidse Babett Knudsen and Mads Mikkelsen), and the story, which is nothing but emotions, served up one at a time, ending with tears of gratitude at the way life sometimes works out. But that’s to reduce a deep experience to its elements, which is to strip it of its magic. And magic — transcendence —is what I’m after. “My kingdom for a hug,” I joke. This movie and the ones I’ll serve up this week are the best I can do in a virtual media to share a hug.

The first time I saw “After the Wedding,” I didn’t see all of it — like just about everyone else in that theater, for the entire last half hour I was afflicted by a bout of silent sobbing that wouldn’t quit.

I cherish that amazing, unforgettable experience: several hundred people weeping together.

And then — I’m not spoiling the movie here — came a “happy ending” that is perhaps the most satisfying conclusion of any film I saw in that decade.

Satisfying because the characters earned it. There was a huge price for each of them to pay, and they stepped up to it. They earned the right to better. And, because you have lived their struggles with them, you leave the movie with the kind of satisfaction that no studio-financed, movie-by-committee-and-focus-group can give you. [To rent the video stream from Amazon Prime, click here.]

On a low budget, with no-name actors and a less sensitive script, “After the Wedding” would be right at home on Lifetime. Consider the plot. Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), a Dane in his 30s, works in an orphanage in India. He hasn’t been home in 20 years, and that’s just fine with him. Bad news: The orphanage is running out of money. Good news: Jørgen, a philanthropist, wants to write the large check that will save it. On one condition: He wants to meet the recipient. The woman who runs the orphanage can’t go. Well, Jørgen is Danish, Jacob is Danish. Jacob should go.

Reluctantly, Jacob flies to Denmark. Jørgen listens to his pitch for only a few minutes before seeming to lose interest — it’s the weekend of his daughter’s wedding. To which Jacob should come. It’s not, after all, like he has anything else to do.

At the wedding, the first surprise: Helene (Sidse Babett Knudsen), Jørgen’s wife, was once Jacob’s lover — the lover who broke Jacob’s heart, the lover who sent him scurrying off to India, an orphan hiding among orphans. Watch the trailer. 

Other surprises: I’ll spare you. And encourage you to read not a word more about the story — let the twists and turns sear you as they roll out. But I’ll go this far: The rich and poor, the white and the colored, Europeans and Indians — the moral lessons are so easy, aren’t they? Or are they? Is Jacob’s moral purity really an emblem of superiority? Is Jørgen’s privileged life a sign of a rotting soul? You’ll judge — you can’t help it — but along the way, you’ll live the emotions.

“After the Wedding” was Denmark’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Academy Awards. It lost to the German film, “The Lives of Others.” I would have voted differently. (The Academy did in 2011. Bier’s next film, “In a Better World,” won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Read the Butler rave here.)

There are movies you stream, and you think that you got the amusement you paid for. But sometimes, very rarely, there are movies that stay with you, that you want to press on someone you love and say, “Here. This. A life-changer.” That, in every possible way, is “After the Wedding.”