Susanne Bier has chosen an unlikely candidate in lead Mads Mikkelsen (‘The Pusher’ trilogy) for this weepy tale of reunion. Following up her previous excellent works of ‘Brothers’ (Brødre) and ‘Open Hearts’ ( Elsker dig for evigt) Bier seems to have a hard time bringing this tome to a crisp conclusion.
When a transmutation is required of Mikkelsen he does his best to be the tragic victim of circumstance trying to do the right thing. But he is partially successful is his collaboration with Bier in getting to the stuff of reconciliation.
Mikkelsen plays Jacob, a born-again Mother Teresa of strong-jawed and swarthy visage working in a destitute orphanage in India. At first meeting he seems to be the perfect savior; the man who gave it all up to embrace the life of the ascetic helping others.
The children idolize him, especially Pramod (Neeral Mulchandani) the eight year old that he has adopted to a greater extent than he has adopted the entire neighborhood. But in his ministering Jacob lacks the inner peace that would seem to come from such work. His looks are furtive and restless, he smokes his cigarette with a sort of inner hatred, as if each exhalation embodies the day’s recriminations for something festering within.
Is he under threat of exposure or is he simply engaged in an endless questioning of his decision to leave his native Denmark for the other end of the world? Is he a pilgrim, or an escapee?
He is guarded even as he presents himself as a hero to the children about him. He lacks the calm and contentment of his female counterpart, the mother figure who tells him that he must return to his native Denmark to meet with a potential donor of unheard-of generosity.
All this is filmed in what becomes an overwrought and tiring hand-held style with endless close-ups trying to get us inside the heads of the characters. The hand-held camera quivers like the lower lip about to break into tears, and we get a waterfall of those later on.
Or is the quivering the shaky hand of the recovering alkie Jacob trying to do the right thing? The shots are simple with the occasional swivel when one of the characters swoons at the revelation of a dark secret held for years. The only problem is the secrets are not really that dark. The shaky camera gets old.
Jacob does not want to return to Denmark. It is a place of bad memories for him, a place where something went wrong. We gather this from the circumstances of the first 20 minutes of the script, but, sadly, not particularly from Mikkelsen’s acting. If he is sodden with shame, he has only one way of showing it. His features don’t reflect the spasmodic terror of barely-controlled memories. He is too much in control to be under the deep self-deprecation that his station suggests.
Returning to Denmark with a promise to return to India and his adopted Pramod, he cleans up and dresses up for the meeting with the rich entrepreneur Jørgen (Rolf Lassgård). Bier morphs Jacob from a pariah in the slums to a well-heeled and handsome international man of fortune in an airplane but Mikkelsen’s expression shows no change. He was worried then and he is worried now. He only wants the whole affair to be over. But he doesn’t know half of the story yet for the shocking secrets he has left behind have come to full fruition.
As the heart of his past is the beautiful and mysterious Helene. Played in fine form by award-winning actress Sidse Babett Knudsen (‘The One and Only,’ ‘Let's Get Lost’) who has taken as a husband the rich but troubled Jørgen, who knows nothing of the secrets she shares with Jacob and the secret she still keeps. In the midst of all this, her daughter is getting married at exactly the same time as Jacob’s visit, the timing of which is actually determined by a secret Jørgen keeps from them all.
If this sounds like a lot of secrets, it is. But in the end all of the secrets are told accompanied by the longest continuous episode of crying in the history of cinema. If we didn’t get the message that these were troubled people through their acting, and Susanne Bier’s and Anders Thomas Jensen’s screenplay, we get the message through the last 20 minutes of continuous blubbering.
It may be all right to cry, but it’s not alright if it tries to substitute for the other 100 minutes of the production.
In the final analysis, the secrets are not dark enough to be intensely engaging. They are secrets we have been told before. And the overall acting and production, although sumptuous and enjoyable enough to view, isn’t sufficient to fill the sameness of the scenes.
After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet)
Very limited opening March 30, 2007 MPAA: Rated R for some language and a scene of sexuality
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