Reviews

It is almost impossible to believe that Kay Pollack's As It Is in Heaven was made only ten years ago in 2004 for it feels dreadfully more dated than that. This Academy Award nominated film, which is essentially the Swedish version of a Lifetime Original Movie with a domestic violence plot line to boot, follows renowned conductor Daniel Daréus (Michael Nyqvist) as he returns to his childhood home in the north of Sweden after suffering a heart attack in the middle of one of his concerts. As a kid, Daniel was ruthlessly beaten and bullied by his peers, but he escaped this harsh childhood with the dream of making music that would connect with people. Upon his return home, Daniel becomes the cantor for the local church choir and starts to bring the townspeople together though what he sees as the spiritual quality of music. Complications arise when Daniel confronts a jealous church pastor, an abusive husband, and various choir members who doubt the sincerity of Daniel's project. Unfortunately, the only remarkable thing about Heaven is how painfully generic it is.

Everything in this film is simple and dull, as if the story arcs, characterization, dialogue, and music were all clumsily smashed into creation by a blindfolded kid with an unwieldy sledgehammer rather than by a skilled artist with a deft touch. The problem begins with a weak script that relies entirely on meager clichés. For example, our hero, Daniel, is the stereotypical passionate artist, but he's severely lacking in depth. All we know is that he loves music, falls in love with a girl, and then dies, both randomly and predictably. His foil, the uptight Pastor Stig (Niklas Falk), is disturbed by Daniel's free-flowing ways and surpasses Daniel only in one-dimensionality. In a particularly ridiculous scene, Stig gets into an argument with his wife, Inger (Ingella Olsson), over his conservative ideas about sexuality. Stig slut- shames his wife, explodes and has passionate sex with her, and then denounces the whole incident the next morning. This tired portrait of the repressed and hypocritical clergyman does nothing for the film, nor adds any interesting conflict or complexity.

Beyond the disappointingly shallow characterizations, Heaven makes a misstep with the plot's desperate grabs for sentimentality. There is, of course, the domestic violence plot line with the overdone, over-the-top abusive husband that makes a mere caricature of this real and important social problem. The issue is not that people like the outrageous abuser Conny (Per Morberg) do not exist in real life, but that he and his wife, Gabriella (Helen Sjöholm), are written in such a hollow way so as to make it seem like the professionals behind Heaven have never actually encountered a real human being who has been involved the cycle of abuse. In the end, Heaven exhibits a detached artificiality that undermines the film's attempt to say something meaningful about the tragedy of abusive relationships and about the empowering triumph for those who survive them. Then there's Tore (André Sjöberg), the young man who is at first shunned and underestimated by members of the choir for his intellectual disability and then ultimately accepted. Despite the fact that the film obviously casts Tore in a positive light, it is nothing more than cheap idealization. Heaven doesn't demonstrate respect Tore as person or a character, but instead uses him as bait for warm fuzzies and reduces him to the object of a patronizing smile.

The film's dialogue also betrays some serious flaws. Heaven takes little advantage of the filmic medium, and the characters often end up explaining their motivations and feelings outright rather than illustrating them through distinctive behavior, well-written characterization, and revealing cinematic techniques. For instance, when Stig shuts down the choir, he yells at Daniel unnecessarily, "I'm taking the choir away from you!" Later when Inger criticizes Stig's vendetta against Daniel, she shouts, "You're not angry at him, but at what he evokes in you!" Of course, the English subtitles may not capture the exact essence of the original Swedish, but the fact remains that a truly solid script would be able to communicate its themes without any of these clunky verbal explanations.

Some movies are disappointing in their failure to live up to their full potential, but As It Is in Heaven is not one of them. Wobbly from the start, Heaven is terrible in a boring kind of way. Perhaps time is partly to blame for how stale the movie feels, and it is possible that in its day, Heaven had some aura of charm and novelty. However, in 2014, it's difficult to see through the haze of bathetic storytelling and overdone conventions.

Susanne Bier's After the Wedding (2006) is a film that wants to be more than it is. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, After the Wedding (original title Efter brylluppet ) follows Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), a Danish man who helps run an underfunded orphanage in India. Reluctantly, Jacob is sent back to Copenhagen in the hopes of securing a large donation from the wealthy businessman Jorgen (Rolf Lassgård) only to slowly realize that Jorgen has singled him out for a specific--and personal--reasons. Ultimately, it's a superficial movie that tries its best at playing deep, a film that never quite achieves the emotional impact for which it strives.

After the Wedding starts off being a movie about how Jacob can't stand rich people. When told that their teacher is going to be sent to the rich-in-comparison land of Denmark, the children at Jacob's orphanage note his distaste of the wealthy. One boy says to Jacob, "Is it because the houses are far apart and the people are far apart?" This is about as profound as the film ever gets.

When Jacob arrives in Copenhagen, the film shifts from being about the political to being about the personal. Jacob meets Jorgen, who at first seems to represent the sort of suave, detached rich man that Jacob despises. However, as the film lumbers forward Jorgen turns out to be a less sinister yet also a less interesting character in an almost lazily written transition. Jorgen is not the manipulative businessman looking for an easy way to buy some publicity, but, in fact, the husband of Jacob's ex-girlfriend, Helene (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and the man who raised Helene and Jacob's daughter (Stine Fischer Christensen), a child Jacob never knew existed until he attended her wedding at Jorgen's invitation. The film meditates on these messy familial relationships for a hot second before revealing what the audience has already guessed fifteen minutes ago, that Jorgen is actually dying and has called Jacob back to Denmark to take his place as the man of the family.

The main weakness of After the Wedding is its thin script that presents a variety of familiar (dare I say cliché) themes without fully delving into any of them in a way that elevates them from mere banality. For instance, the idea of a man meeting his daughter for the first time after 22 years, the agony of a father organizing his life in preparation for his own death, the tenuous rekindling of a romance with the one that got away, and the struggle to provide aid and resources for underprivileged children are all perfectly fine topics that get thrown together and promptly skirted over in this film.

Rather than taking the time to develop any of these themes with any sort of nuance or inventiveness, Bier simply plops them down into the movie and moves on to the next thing as if the audience is expected to have some sort of emotional reaction at just at the mention of these "serious" topics. Instead of communicating heart wrenching truths through the sort of strong writing that paves the way for arresting acting performances, Bier scrounges for emotion in a never ending stream of close-up shots of both human and (yikes) dead animal eyes. In a word, there's a lack of depth and artfulness to the screenplay and the film as a whole. It's a shame that Mads Mikkelsen's stoic stare isn't put to better use.

That's not to say that After the Wedding is a disaster. There are some charming moments that arise from Bier's use of parallels in the movie, for example. In one such moment, the camera lingers on Jacob's nervous habits, (wiping the scuffs from his dress shoes, shifting his feet, hand tapping) and then closes in on similar anxious tics expressed by his daughter, Anna, thus visually portraying their heredity. Moreover, another parallel occurs when the camera pays special attention to Jorgen zipping up the coat of one of his young sons, only to show Jacob doing the same thing later in the film after Jorgen's metaphorical passing of the torch has been made clear. Sure, maybe these parallels could do with a bit more subtlety, but they're just clever enough that they inspire confidence that Bier at least has some sense of direction for the film. However, these strong moments are not enough to tip the balance in Bier's favor. All in all, After the Wedding is an unremarkable film bogged down by mediocre screen writing and an overeager desire for a quantity of ideas over quality.

It's a slippery film, The Man Without a Past (original title Mies vailla menneisyyttä). Not quite film noir, not quite a parody of film noir, the movie tells the story of a man who is left penniless and clueless after a group of small-time thugs beat away his memory in the outskirts of Helsinki. This Oscar nominated film and winner of the Cannes Film Festival's Grand Prix is the second movie in writer-director Aki Kaurismaki's Finland trilogy. A comedy, noir, crime film, and satire, The Man draws on a variety of different genres but doesn't fully conform to any of them, thus maintaining a sense of self-consciousness that adds a dash of playfulness to the dry-as-bone dialogue.

We know almost nothing about The Man (Markku Peltola) when he first appears to us disembarking a train with a single suitcase in hand, but that doesn't really matter. For one thing, neither does The Man, as the unfortunate mugging that leaves him stricken with amnesia quietly occurs within the first few minutes of the film. For another, The Man Without a Past is all about the indomitable will to keep moving forward. It's the present that matters most and what a triumph over present challenges means for the promise of a brighter future. The film emphasizes this theme even in the very beginning of, showing The Man living moment to moment as he wakes up from his brutal beating only to pass out again in a public bathroom. A custodian eyes The Man's bloody figure sprawled on the floor and says into his walkie, "We have a dead man here." But The Man lives, although only to be pronounced dead yet again in a hospital bed. When the defeated doctor and nurse leave his side, The Man simply opens his eyes as if waking from a brief siesta and takes off...only to pass out for the final time on the bank of a river. It is obvious that, even stripped of his most essential possessions like his health and a sense of identity, The Man will not give in to misfortune. Later on, after The Man's ingenuity and hard work has resulted in a small garden of potatoes, he makes sure to save a few for the winter. He explains to his friend, "We farmers must think of the coming years, too." While only a couple months earlier he was just a nameless nomad, The Man has turned himself into a farmer with prospects for the future.

Fortunately, The Man's story doesn't end on the side of a riverbank. A family of four on the outskirts of Helsinki takes him in and nurses him back to health. He becomes well enough to start living on his own in the horrendously unkempt container shed rented to him at a high price by gruff security guard, Anttila (Sakari Kuosmanen). The Man swiftly cleans up the container to create cozy home and inserts himself into the quirky community of downtrodden outsiders that includes a love interest in the form of a lonely Salvation Army soldier, a Christian band that he turns into the hottest rhythm act in the area, a lawyer with a gigantic cigar, an adorable dog named Hannibal, and the most polite bank robber ever.

Aside from the oddball characters and wacky situations that The Man finds himself, the comedy of this rather dark and subdued film comes the stylized acting and dialogue that draws on the cool personas seen in film noir and movies of the French New Wave. The Man and his lady love, Irma, (Kati Outinen) move with a stilted awkwardness and stare with blank expressions ever so slightly tinged with sadness. The characters speak in short, clipped banter that exemplifies the pinnacle of deadpan humor. For instance, while cooking dinner for Irma on a date at his place, an exchange between the pair goes as follows: Irma: The peas were fine.

The Man: I went to the moon yesterday.

Irma: Oh. I see. How was it? In Kaurismaki's world, everything is serious but not to be taken seriously.

As the film goes on, the challenges The Man faces become less significant and ever the more ridiculous. Complications from The Man's past that initially seem major enough to separate he and Irma forever turn out to be laughably minor. Although The Man Without a Past is a film in which the emotional volume is turned down, it still delivers a happy, if not heartwarming, ending, thus further deviating from the film noir mold. There's a satisfying showdown with the criminals who beat up The Man in the beginning, but this time our protagonist has the whole town to back him up. This climax signifies The Man's triumph against all odds and the power of the marginalized when they stand together. Turning to The Man after scaring away his assailants, one of The Man's rescuers says, "So you decided to come back. The Man doesn't miss a beat, deadpanning "Obviously." At this point, we should expect nothing less from The Man Without a Past.

Petter Naess's Elling (2001) delivers as a heartwarming coming of age comedy with a twist: the protagonist is not some teenager caught in the complexities of adolescence but a 40-year-old man caught in the complexities of basic daily living. The 40-year-old man is Elling (Per Christian Ellefsen), the winsome protagonist of this Oscar nominated film. Elling falls somewhere on the autism spectrum and lives a comfortable yet sheltered life until everything changes with the death of his mother and caretaker. Carted off by the Norwegian authorities when they find him distraught and huddling in his mother's closet, Elling ends up in an institution where he meets his roommate and partner in crime for the rest of the film, the lusty yet virginal Kjell Bjarne (Sven Nordin).

All this plot is merely setup for the rest of the film and is communicated efficiently, though perhaps not elegantly, through a choppy sequence interspersed throughout the opening credits. The film manages to hit its stride when Elling and Kjell Bjarne venture out in the real world to live on their own in an apartment in Oslo. Prompted by their social worker Frank Asli (Jorgen Langhelle), the duo hesitantly takes on their newfound independence, navigating the familiar struggles of friendship, romance, and self-fulfillment in this well-paced crowd-pleaser.

Right away Elling has trouble adjusting to his newfound independence. Explaining his troubles in an eloquent voice over, Elling says, "I've always had two enemies: dizziness and anxiety. They follow me wherever I go." This overwhelming anxiety is the root of Elling's resistance to participate in the everyday activities that Frank commands, like answering the phone, going to the grocery store, and generally venturing outside the apartment. After all, as Elling points out "Why have an apartment if we leave it all the time?!" Though many viewers may not share the fear of stepping foot outside their residences, Elling is downright relatable. This broad of appeal of the film is thanks in large part to Per Christian Ellefsen's excellent performance as the charming and nuanced Elling, a character not only tentative and bookish, but also funny, charming, and at times even grandiose.

Ellefsen vivifies Elling with a nervous energy particularly apparent in a scene in which Elling and Kjell Bjarne have their first evening out alone at a local restaurant. Basking in the victory of their successful outing, Elling decides to give Frank a call to prove how well he and Kjell Bjarne are doing, but there's one problem: the phone is so far away and the path to it is so filled with people. Ellefson perfectly animates Elling's terror, moving with an inching, wooden walk and a furrowed brow that punctuates a wild stare. However, when Elling manages to reach the phone and make his first real phone call, Ellefson lights Elling's face with a glee just as intense as the terror.

It would be misleading to praise Per Christian Ellefsen without also mentioning Sven Nordin's delightful turn as the lovable wannabe lothario, Kjell Bjarne. While Kjell Bjarne is initially much more easily motivated to risk the bustle of the outside world with the promise of women or food, he still craves the familiarity of institutionalized living. Accordingly, he and Elling decide to push their beds next to each other and turn their two-bedroom apartment into a one bedroom apartment equipped with a library/workshop. This sleeping situation becomes an important symbol of the quirky duo's codependent relationship and its eventual evolution into a rich friendship between two autonomous individuals.

The friendship between Elling and Kjell Bjarne, and all of the growing pains it experiences, is another major theme in the film. Not only does the twosome's pairing provide rich source for comedy, but it also reveals the character progressions of Kjell Bjarne and Elling. Kjell Bjarne starts to drift from Elling's side as he becomes involved with the pregnant upstairs neighbor, Reidun (Marit Pia Jacobsen). Feeling the ever-so-slight sting of rejection, Elling decides it's time to have some adventures of his own, during which he meets a kindred spirit, retired poet Alfons Jørgensen (Per Christensen). Elling ponders incredulously in voice over, "Had I really made a friend without the help of the Norwegian government?" Indeed, he has, and more importantly, he reflects the basic human emotion of triumphant satisfaction, a feeling powerful in its universal relatability. It's the simple things in life, after all.

Upon Elling's first solo outing, he dons shades and a trench coat, a superficial representation of his personal growth. However, by the closing of the film Elling no longer needs flashy new clothes to validate his transformation into a more fully self-actualized adult. The thematic relatability of the awkward process of growing up combined with the enigmatic acting by the main cast makes Elling's story one to empathize with, even if we aren't struggling with anxiety, experiencing our first apartment, or living in Norway. In the end, when he says of his new self, "Mama's boy, maybe, but a new dangerous version" we can't help but feel a twinge of pride not only for Elling, but also for ourselves.