Word: jacob
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...excellent script by Anders Jensen and phenomenal performances by each and every actor, it’s no wonder that this Danish film was nominated for a 2006 Oscar for best foreign language film. “After the Wedding” opens with images from Bombay, India. Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen, perhaps better known as evil banker Le Chiffre from “Casino Royale”) has been living there for over 20 years, working at an under-financed orphanage. When a wealthy businessman in Denmark offers the orphanage a potential donation, Jacob finds himself back in his native...
...Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen) is an austere and rather cadaverous man, running a desperately under-financed orphanage in Bombay, lavishing what love he can spare on one of its inmates, a little boy named Pramod. If there's any hope that Jacob might keep his institution solvent, it lies in an offer from a mysterious mogul in his native Denmark, who wants to meet with him before committing to fund his efforts. Reluctantly, he agrees to fly home to meet with his would-be benefactor...
...Once Jacob lands in Denmark After the Wedding - a rich, intricate and very gripping movie from Susanne Bier - takes off. His benefactor, Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard), is Jacob's opposite in every way. He's a large, bumptious man, open in his emotions - genial and generous in his family life - but devious and manipulative in his business dealings. He invites Jacob to attend the wedding of his adopted daughter, knowing full well that (a) he has married the great love of Jacob's life and (b) that the daughter is actually Jacob's child - a fact that becomes agonizingly clear...
...Take Jacob, for instance. He was not always the grim and asexual idealist he appears to be. At one time he was a doper and a drunk idling his life away in third-world squalor. It is why Helene (Jorgen's sensual yet sensible wife, limpidly played by Sidse Babett Knudsen) long ago left him. And why she is startled to encounter him as a new self, stern and rectitudinous. It's the same way with Jorgen. Underneath his affability there is a willful and angry self-made man - and a brutality that is openly manifested in a drunken restaurant...
...somehow that conclusion is achieved - maybe with a certain amount of ambiguity, but at least with Jacob's kids provided for and with him tenuously reconnecting with a better, less tightly wired, self. There is, indeed, an implicit promise that with all secrets revealed, all debts to the past paid, lives can proceed in a more humane way. Which is fine and deeply satisfying...