After
“After” is a good movie and a big family drama, but I think it’s really annoying too. This is because of its deliberate untruthfulness and the fact that it doesn’t make sense on purpose. You may have a different opinion.
“Family’s the most important thing,” Nora Valentino (Kathleen Quinlan) tells one of her children who’s acting up at the start of the film. Nora is in charge of the house in Rochester; her husband Mitch (John Doman) runs a stone works/contracting biz there or lets his oldest son Christian (Pablo Schreiber) run it these days, anyway.
There’s a screw-up younger brother, a bar-owning sister, some extended family around town; it’s pretty tight knit. But the apple of Nora’s eye is never there: daughter Sam went off to make her way in Manhattan years ago, and keeps in touch with chipper home-video updates delivered on VHS tape. The movie takes place in fall 2002.
The Valentinos are protective of Nora, who can snap emotionally for what seems like no reason one time she almost has a breakdown after accidentally stepping on one flower in her well-tended backyard garden and this takes its toll on Mitch, who when not fiercely hovering over his wife is bitching about how immigrants are ruining this country.
He’s hard to love, and Doman might be too good at playing that side of him; Christian ends up at loose ends trying to mop up what his dad’s business has become while he only exists here, where having been allowed some range Schreiber gives a nice performance that isn’t entirely sociopathic (“Orange Is The New Black”) or hideously batshit (“Save Benson”). And speaking of “SVU,” Diane Neal quietly sexy ADA Novak for several seasons is slightly more unleashed as a hard-drinking barmaid who, like the actual Valentinos, is involved in a scheme that could blow up on the family any moment.
I don’t spoil movies, so I won’t say much more. It’s a well made film. It looks good and it moves right along and they talk like human beings and everything. The press materials for “After” speak of a “slow reveal,” but I myself figured out what was going to be revealed pretty quickly; and while I appreciate what the movie is doing, I couldn’t buy in to its scenario and in some sense therefore couldn’t summon up for these characters whatever it is the filmmakers think we should feel about them. So I found “After” rather unsatisfying.
Its conscientiousness is marred, I fear, by a sentimental overearnestness on the part of director Pieter Gasperz and writer Sabrina Gennerino that stretches a narrative metaphor far past any reasonable limit.
“After” starts with some voiceover about how some moments in life seem like they should define a person, and from there, the clichés just keep coming. If Tessa Young (Josephine Langford) has one life-defining moment, it’s meeting Hardin Scott (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), being annoyed by Hardin Scott, falling in love with Hardin Scott, being heart-broken by Hardin Scott or reuniting with Hardin Scott.
She’s a young woman from the suburbs who’s never done anything fun. He’s a bad-boy type who is mean to her because he likes her so much! and also because he has some deeply buried family secrets and is not nice to any other girl ever until he meets her. He quotes Keats once and condemns love as “a fickle beast” that doesn’t exist the rest of the time.
The movie is based on the first book in Anna Todd’s series of novels which might explain why nothing here feels like something that could happen to anyone but does feel like something that happens to someone else when they tell you they’re “literally going insane.” Like those movies, this isn’t really a story as much as it is three events happening, followed by an ellipsis promising an ending next time.
Unlike those movies, there are no supernatural creatures or kinky-winky stuff. The most we get here is a lot of sleepy actors who maybe could be mistaken for ghosts sometimes and are very polite about their foreplay.
Tessa goes off to school with her mom Carol (Selma Blair) and high school boyfriend Noah (Dylan Arnold), who acts more like Tessa’s brother until he gives her what might be history’s least enthusiastic peck good bye before she leaves for college. When your final kiss from your soon to be ex-boyfriend is barely effortful enough to qualify as sensual, even this muted-Hardin sensuality represents an upgrade.
She and Hardin meet when she finds him sitting in her dorm room. He won’t leave. She gets out of the shower. Later, they have a fight about Pride and Prejudice because they both love it, which is really more like if you took the part where Elizabeth Bennett is mean to Mr. Darcy and just made that the whole book which we know because Susan McMartin’s screenplay is very explicit in comparing itself to Pride and Prejudice, which is a bold choice.
Finally they bury the hatchet when Tessa tells Hardin that even though she always thought Romeo & Juliet were dumb for killing themselves over some miscommunication, now she GETS IT. From there, their love story blossoms in between scenes where two people stand fully clothed next to each other outside at night while one smokes.
Hardin soon discovers that Tessa has never actually read a book, which he knows because every time he asks her what her favorite book is, she says “Pride and Prejudice” again so he takes her back to his room (which looks 10 times larger than any other dorm room we see) and shows her his vintage hardcover copies of Jane Austen novels while touching his face directly next to hers for several seconds. She doesn’t kiss him then because instead she pulls away slowly while looking into his eyes like she’s solving a magic eye puzzle.
Later or perhaps earlier! Time is truly a flat circle here! he watches her sleep all night before leaving first thing in the morning without waking her up or saying goodbye. Which is another thing: I’m not sure people understand how wild it would be if someone you’d known for three weeks was just asleep on your couch when you woke up in the morning? This movie’s treatment of sleepovers makes them seem much less casual than I feel like they should be.
Then he really starts to let her down by becoming exactly the person she knows he is. He takes her virginity (at least I think so? That’s what it looked like, though a friend I saw the movie with thought they just had sex with no fanfare or comment about it, which honestly would be very on-brand). Then he tells his friends their relationship isn’t serious. Then he gets drunk and kisses another girl in front of her. Then he blames her for getting mad at him when she finds out. Then well, you get the idea!
They can grow or they cannot. It’s difficult to say whether Jenny Gage is bound by the conventions of a young adult romance, in which all the sexy stuff happens off screen, or if we’re meant to take the sensuality at face value and therefore assume that the couple simply takes off their clothes a little more with each encounter before cuddling. They do have sex after suspicious of love Hardin asks Tessa to move in with him, and there’s a predictable hiccup in their relationship soon after involving a couple of Hardin’s drama-hungry friends. There’s much pouting.
If many of these observations seem to be about the sex (or lack thereof), it’s only because nothing else in this movie is as interesting certainly not as baffling (save for some odd plot-mandated choices on the part of peripheral characters, such as Tessa’s mother all but disowning her daughter upon discovering their relationship).
Tessa is mostly left as an empty vessel through which the story moves and reacts against Hardin’s changing opinion of her as a love interest. The performances are uniformly flat, and the dialogue is either saccharine (in terms of romantic statements) or on the nose (in terms of giving Hardin a back story to explain his bad-boy act).
At one point in “After,” when these two inevitable lovers dive underwater, and we’re left with just the stillness and quiet of a lake. “It’s beautiful, silence,” Hardin says when he resurfaces. You have no idea, kid.
Watch After For Free On Solarmovies.