I am a big fan of films that try to capture, the best they can, the unique relationship that exists between a husband and a wife. I’ve been married for almost 6 years and ever since I got married have been aching to see a director emulate and paint a realistic portrayal of marriage. With most films only having about 90 minutes to completely tell their story, I realize the arduous task ahead of them. But that doesn’t negate their responsibility in presenting an authentic view of relationships, since that’s what a marriage is; one of the most unique and special and complex relationships you’ll ever see. And here we have, Helena From The Wedding. On the surface she looks like a film about marriage and infidelity and how couples stay together through the “hard times” and what happens to them when a single, blonde, young, hot, model is thrown into the mix…

When the film opens we join Alex (played marvelously by Lee Tergesen) and Alice (played by the most underrated actress out there now Melanie Lynskey), a newly married couple (about 6 months) driving through the snow to Alex’s parents’ cabin in the woods for New Year’s. They will soon be joined by friends Don and Lynn (Dominic Fumusa & Jessica Hecht), who we surmise have been married for a while with a couple of kids, Eve and Steven (Dagmara Dominiczyk & Corey Stoll) who are married and are pregnant, Nick (Paul Fitzgerald), the recently separated childhood friend of Alex, and Helena (Gillian Jacobs), the young, blonde, twentysomething that attended Eve and Steven’s wedding. Right from the start we can see that Alex and Alice are slated as the “newlywed” couple who are enjoying their “honeymoon” phase while the other couple’s are seasoned veterans who are cynical of their “cutesy love.”

The premise of the film isn’t really anything we haven’t seen already, Dan in Real Life comes to mind, as well as a little mix of Rachel Getting Married and maybe Margot at the Wedding, which only really means that it involves marriage and dysfunction. Which one could easily describe as life in general: relationships and dysfunction and how we manage the two. What sets HFTW (Helena From The Wedding’s abbreviation that will be used from here on out) apart from those films and other “marriage” films is that a lot is left up to the audience for interpretation.

Helena From The Wedding was one of those tense and awkward and beautiful and understated films that said more about relationships and identity in its silence than it did with its words. Director Joseph Infantolino with his first feature directorial debut said to me in an interview afterwards that he didn’t necessarily want to go after explaining every feeling and emotion that was going on in the film through dialogue, but to let the nuances and the subtle looks tell the story. I loved the interplay between the couple’s and how Joseph chose to concentrate a good number of shots on the face and emphasize the expressions. I think if the film had maybe 30 more minutes of that kind of “dialogue” it may have seemed too empty of a film, but Infantolino did a wonderful job of balancing spoken dialogue and in-between-the-lines emotion. And every emotion was extremely heightened because of the closeness of the characters in the cabin; there was no where they could run and hide and internalize everything.

There’s something very tense yet powerful about a film that utilizes minimal sets and minimal locations and shoots the entire film within the confines of one structure. It’s an almost claustrophobic way of filming, but I think it brings out the best in the actors and allows them to organically feed and play off of each other. Joseph’s choice of shooting the entire film within the walls of the cabin and outside really amped up the emotion and the connections between the actors. Through researching before the film I found out that a majority of the actors have played Broadway before and currently, and the cool thing is that I thought the film was, of course on a much grander scale, kind of like a Broadway play, but with more subtle motion and acting.

There aren’t many films that can grasp the reality of marriage. Either directors make it too fairy tale or they present it as some “tradition” that is “meant to be broken” by divorce and that all couple’s will end up there. For some reason, they can’t write a realistic marriage. Although Infantolino didn’t set out to make the most realistic marriage film he could, I do applaud his efforts in maintaining authenticity in the awkwardness. I think awkwardness is hard to do in relationships. You can do extremely joyful, or extremely depressing, but showing the subtleties of tension and a slight feeling of distrust is difficult: and HFTW excelled at that!

I won’t give the film away but it plays a lot on identity and how it changes with marriage. When we get married, we tend to change the way we think about ourselves. As Infantolino put it, “Failures are big failures and successes are really big successes.” There’s also some really great interactions with the husbands and the young Helena and how each of them reacts differently to attention and affection from her, albeit directly or indirectly. What happens to married men when a young single girl starts to show attention towards them, especially when there’s trouble with their marriage…

In the end, HFTW, I thought, was about relationships and whether or not they are worth the fight. Whatever your answer is, one thing is for sure: Helena From The Wedding was worth it.

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3. SXSW 2010: Day Two Recap
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