AFTER THE WEDDING (Susanne Bier, 2006)

An unusually amiable narrative film in which feelings take precedence over plot, Efter brylluppet transcends its contrivances to suggest how unexpected circumstances can shift our souls and cause us to leave important pieces of our lives behind. Directed by Susanne Bier from Anders Thomas Jensen’s script, which is based on Bier’s original story, this Danish film delivers a gentle blow to the heart that, unerringly aimed, profoundly registers.
     The protagonist is Jacob Petersen, who leaves the financially strapped orphanage he runs in Bombay, including the boy who has become his surrogate son, for what he believes will be a week in Copenhagen, to petition a billionaire businessman for funds. It turns out that Jørgen is married to Jacob’s former lover, Helene; when he attends Jørgen’s adopted daughter’s wedding, Jacob realizes that Anna is his daughter. According to the stipulations of dying Jørgen’s donation of millions, Jacob will return to India only to pack up and leave forever.
     Bier draws poignant life from her soap operatic set-up as Jacob is forced to confront daunting issues in a nobly committed life shaded with personal weakness and various kinds of failures. To be sure, the plot wobbles. It is impossible for me to believe, for instance, that Helene and her husband concluded that Jacob must be deceased when they couldn’t determine his whereabouts. But all such matters become immaterial when the humanity of Bier’s enterprise, itself a kind of orphanage, kicks into high gear.
     At alive center is the tightly wound, wounded performance by former dancer Mads Mikkelsen, whose face bears the imprint of every bit of hard living that the script attributes to Jacob. The final scene between Jacob and the Indian boy whose adoption he proposes may haunt me for the rest of my life.

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (Norman Jewison, 1967)

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, who won an Oscar, give thin, obvious, oversized performances in this, a vaguely comical social melodrama and insignificant murder mystery clumsily tailored to suit the contrived confrontation between a northern cop stranded in the south (“They call me Mister Tibbs!”) and a southern redneck cop. This mess of a movie, which its fans consider charming, won the best picture Oscar.
     It is hard to imagine what sort of person is engaged by tripe like this, which in one instance generates what passes for a progressive moment, but is really an odious titillation, when the black cop slaps across the face a rich, pampered, locally powerful piece of arrogant white scum. (I did say melodrama, didn’t I?) The American civil rights movement, into which it has been conveniently folded, confers neither legitimacy nor artistic value on Norman Jewison’s inflated film. As reviewer Pauline Kael was quick to remind us, moreover, the maker also of Fiddler on the Roof (1971) was Protestant, however his name sounds.
     Lee Grant’s emoting as the widow of a murder victim argues for reinstatement of the blacklist, while Scott Wilson, as a young criminal, contributes the only decent, believable acting. Wilson would be exceptionally good as the American soldier in Krzysztof Zanussi’s excellent postwar A Year of the Quiet Sun (1984). I wrote of his more recent performance in Junebug (Phil Morrison, 2005): “Here [Wilson] plays Eugene, the boys’ father, and he plays the reticent, deliberate man to the bone.” Wilson, not Steiger, is an American film actor of grace, perception and talent.
     In the Heat of the Night is an example of a film that proceeds by scenes rather than shots. It follows the plot.