After the Wedding.

"After the Wedding, from the Danish director Susanne Bier, isn't an especially showy film (although it's luminously photographed, in the post-Bergman Scandinavian tradition), and the story it tells is classic family drama, even if you might not see all its twists coming," writes Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. "A wanderer long absent from his homeland, who has found a surrogate family elsewhere, reluctantly returns to discover that the past still has a surprising hold on him. What feels at first like a quiet, straightforward picture builds into one of the richest and most satisfying of the year so far, in any genre or any language."

Vadim Rizov, writing for the Reeler, could hardly agree: "The plot is an outrageous and manipulative confluence of worst-case scenarios; offensive because it begs to be taken seriously, After the Wedding beats an emotional reaction out of the viewer by any means necessary."

Updated through 4/5.

For Manohla Dargis, writing in the New York Times, this is "a fine and, on a scene-by-scene basis, often better than fine, if effectively unadventurous work, in which a man's anguished cry is met by a finale designed to ease the pain."

"Like all Bier's work, After the Wedding is frankly a melodrama, a film where the emotions are huge and the coincidences larger still," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "But more important, it's that paradoxical melodrama that point-blank refuses to acknowledge that it's being melodramatic, conveying its scenario with enough intensity, psychological acuity and forceful acting to ignore labels and flat-out overpower audiences."

"[W]e are in soap opera country," writes Richard Schickel for Time. "And maybe we are, but that reckons without the easy naturalism of Anders Thomas Jensen's script and the brilliance with which it is played by its perfectly cast actors."

"Similar to the Danish director's last film, Brothers, big moments remain grounded with elusive, elliptical camerawork," writes Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE. Even so, the final turn "smacks of falseness."

Howard Feinstein has a good long talk with Bier for Filmmaker.

Update, 4/4: Noel Murray for the AV Club: "With its soapy earnestness and use of suffering souls as set dressing, After The Wedding could be the cinematic equivalent of a Coldplay song. And while that isn't necessarily a slam, it isn't a recommendation either."

Update, 4/5: "In the last few years, [Mads] Mikkelsen has played a dangerous Bond foil in Casino Royale, a thug seeking redemption in Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher II and now portrays the soulful manager of an orphanage in Susanne Bier's After the Wedding," notes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "That sort of chameleon versatility doesn't come along very often."

Posted by dwhudson at March 30, 2007 12:36 PM