After the Wedding review – Four-hanky tearjerker

This melodramatic enterprise is clearly geared to pull emotional strings on every level.

Michelle Williams in After the Wedding. Photo: Sony Pictures

After the Wedding combines the talents of Academy Award-winner Julianne Moore and Academy Award-nominee Michelle Williams who go toe-to-toe in this, a four-hanky tearjerker.

Director Bart Freundlich ladles out the syrup in this reasonably engrossing tale about hidden family secrets which have a way of coming out in the end.

Moore, as good as ever, plays a successful and wealthy New York businesswoman named Theresa Young whose adopted daughter Grace (Abby Quinn) is about to get married. She is a philanthropist who uses her millions to help benefit humanity.

Julianne Moore in After the Wedding. Photo: Sony Pictures

Williams, with cropped blonde hair and a look of perpetual anguish, portrays Isabel, who left New York two decades earlier to run an orphanage in a Kolkata slum. It’s a rewarding job, but stressful because of a continual lack of funds.

Then a new benefactor emerges. She is Theresa who lives in New York and has specifically requested Isabel’s presence.

Balking at first at the demand of an uncommitted philanthropist, she relents, and travels to a city she deliberately hasn’t returned to in over two decades.