Twist again

Isabel (Michelle Williams) is an earnest and dedicated young American ex-patriot who has a central role at an orphanage in India. Theresa (Julianne Moore) is a flamboyant American businesswoman who offers the orphanage a six-figure donation, but insists that Isabel fly to New York for a meeting before closing the deal.

Isabel arrives to find the meeting cut short and semi-postponed until after the weekend’s wedding of Grace (Abby Quinn), the daughter of Theresa and her husband, Oscar (Billy Crudup), a quirky artist who caters to a ritzy clientele. Grace adores her father, jousts ambivalently with Theresa (who is not her birth mother), and has somewhat unstable relations with Frank (Will Chase), the supercilious young gent she’s about to marry.

There are quietly troubling complications sprouting among and all around these characters, with some particularly intriguing instances emerging via artfully indirect hints that Isabel and Oscar know each other from some implicitly fraught time in the past. After the Wedding’s gentle, smoldering buildup to the revelation of their secrets (and those of Theresa as well) serves as an increasingly dramatic undercurrent for the film as a whole.

Those undercurrents and the performances that give life to them are the best things in this strangely furnished domestic melodrama. The film is an American remake of a 2006 Danish film, which got an Oscar nomination and received much more respectful reviews than this one has.

Both versions carry the burden of a bizarre and convoluted plot (created originally by the Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier). Bart Freundlich’s American version has the special benefit of Williams and Moore and Freundlich’s low-key, flavorsome direction. That approach counters the excesses of plot with rapt attention to emotional detail and nuance.

All in all, nuance and detail are the heart of the matter here. On paper, the plot—with its orphans, family secrets, role reversals, conflicted parents, emotional zig zags—is blatantly outlandish. Onscreen, it works as a proper scaffolding for a multifaceted study of paradoxical passions in a handful of distinctively “modern” characters.