Wedding blues

With his long and glowering face, Mads Mikkelsen is the Christopher Walken of Denmark. Both have played Bond villains, and if Mikkelsen were to work on his accent and guest-host on Saturday Night Live it would take a minute or two to realize the substitution. The difference is that Mikkelsen, at age 40, can still play legitimate romantic leads; there was audible swooning at the screening room where I saw his latest local picture, Susanne Bier's After the Wedding, which IFC Films opens on March 30. Walken, meanwhile, has to make do with a padded and bewigged John Travolta in this summer's film version of the Hairspray musical. Maybe the two actors will do a father-son thing together.

Mikkelsen's always slightly menacing presence in the trailer for After the Wedding indicated a thriller, but this is misleading. The film, which Bier co-wrote with Anders Thomas Jensen, is more of a soap opera, which I don't mean disparagingly; the story baits you with little plot hooks that add up to a larger, more dimensional hole. With its secrets and lies, it put me in mind of The Celebration, without that film's malicious edge. Mikkelsen is Jacob, who walked out on a drug-soaked past in Amsterdam for a more fulfilling and redemptive life managing an orphanage in India. (The sighing started when he and one the boys in his care struck up a natural rapport; nothing like a kid to warm up an icy-looking male lead a little. I was just amazed to see that Mikkelsen was capable of a tan.) An industrial magnate, Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard), offers to make the orphanage's money woes go away permanently, if only Jacob will attend his daughter's wedding back home, which the idealistic Jacob is loathe to do. Money talks, however, so Jacob dons his penguin suit--and is alarmed to discover that Jorgen is married to his former flame, Helene (Sidse Babett Knudsen). You can probably guess how Jacob is related to Jorgen and Helene's newlywed daughter, Anna (Stine Fischer Christensen), but just why the plump and self-satisfied Jorgen, who puts unwelcome conditions on his gift, is pulling the strings is revealed more gradually.

Bier's last film, 2005's Brothers, was about two people not having an affair, and there is a similar reticence here. (Except when everyone is grooving to the Weather Girls' "It's Raining Men," which happens twice at family gatherings. It's strangely...Walkenesque, watching Mikkelsen fly his freak flag for a few minutes.) That film had the Iraq war as a backdrop, but this one is more cosmic, gathering up strands of sentiment and attachment, first to make a switch--everyone winds up a little stung under love's lash--then tying them up for a hankie, which you might need at the picture's conclusion, not that the director overstimulates the tear ducts. A good foil for the chubby and life-embracing Lassard, her star is not for melting, which is all the better for the piece, which might dissolve into treacle without his steely presence.

After the Wedding is the weakest of the films nominated for the 2006 Foreign-Language Film Oscar. But it's still pretty good, and the final proof of a strong year for that category.