Dir. Susanne Bier, Denmark/Sweden, 2010, 118 mins, Danish/Swedish/English with subtitles
Cast: Mikael Persbrandt, Trine Dyrholm, William Jøhnk Nielsen, Markus Rygaard
Review by Eva Moravetz
With humankind plagued by the rapidly escalating ills and problems of the world, we are confronted with aggression and violence in one form or another on a daily basis. Luckily for most of us, it is only via television or in the newspapers. However, when malice smiles directly into your own face, what should an ordinary person do? Should he try to find the root of the problem and attempt to fix things like a liberal idealist, turn the other cheek like a good Christian or should he succumb to that most primeval human instinct of all: revenge? These are the underlying questions in Susanne Bier’s deliciously suspenseful and nerve-rackingly tense family drama, which stretches from the heat and dust of Africa to the idyllic surroundings of rural Denmark and back.
Family man and doctor Anton, played by the charismatic Mikael Persbrandt, works at an African refugee camp. Withered, tired and covered in sweat, he tends to the wounded – mainly women and young girls raped or tortured by an evil warlord and his henchmen. Back home in a peaceful Danish town, Anton’s son Elias (Markus Rygaard), the butt of jokes and frequently bullied at school, makes a new friend. Christian (William Jøhnk Nielsen), the quiet and enigmatic new boy in class, has just lost his mother to cancer (her funeral is one of the opening scenes) and has moved back to Denmark from London with his businessman father. He lives with her grandmother, while his busy father, Claus (Ulrich Thomsen), is constantly away. One day, Elias is attacked by the school bully and Christian leaps to his defence and beats the tormentor to a pulp. Elias is stunned and surprised and the boys become inseparable. Christian’s brooding intensity and bubbling anger hide both his emotional pain at the death of his mother and a capacity for ever more extreme measures to ‘do justice’. Meanwhile, Elias’s feisty but emotionally volatile mother, Marianne (Trine Dyrholm), also a doctor and separated from Anton, regards Christian’s magnetic influence on her son with suspicion and worry.
When Anton returns to Denmark, he becomes a sort of guardian to Christian. Anton believes in passive resistance and tries to persuade the boys to share his views but it has the opposite effect on Christian whose smouldering passion and thirst for revenge are increasing by the hour. The Danish title of the film means ‘The Revenge’, which carries a dynamic punch, which is lost in the English version. And when Anton returns to Africa, he is faced with the biggest moral challenge of his life. The murderous warlord is brought to the camp badly wounded and Anton is expected to treat his injuries, otherwise he will die.
This densely plotted and intricate story keeps us on the edge of our seats, thanks to the brilliant script co-written by Susanne Bier and award-winning scriptwriter Anders Thomas Jensen. The acting is par excellence, particularly that of Nielsen as Christian. His intensity and maturity belie his youth. All the characters are cast perfectly; Anton’s impossibly blue eyes and placid manner are metaphors for his pacifism, Elias’s protruding teeth and big ears hide a gentle soul and Marianne’s feistiness is a façade for her emotional sensitivity.
The film is full of contrasts and is in fact built on them. The wild, hot, windswept plains of Africa are as much in contrast to the lush Danish lakeside as Anton’s civilised soul is to Christian’s vengeful angel. The question is, what is under the surface? Is it possible that beneath Anton’s pacifism lurks Christian’s desire for retaliation? Is Christian the shadow all of us have inside? As Anton becomes a kind of surrogate father and saviour for Christian, we begin to suspect that they may be different sides of the same coin. Although the film openly contrasts the idea of ‘turning the other cheek’ with ‘an eye for an eye’, we are left to decide for ourselves what is right and what is wrong. The film doesn’t say which way is the right one but instead shows, through the dramatic events in the lives of a group of people, what the consequences can be and also how defenceless we are in the face of life’s events, while trying to conform to society’s rules.
In A Better World won both the 68th Golden Globe and the 83rd Academy Award in the Best Foreign Film category in 2011 on top of winning a handful of other festival awards. Susanne Bier is a very accomplished director with such films to her name as the Oscar-nominated After The Wedding (2006) and the US produced Things We Lost In The Fire (2007) starring Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro and the success of In A Better World is a well deserved boost to her reputation as not only one of Denmark’s best filmmakers but one of cinema’s best storytellers as well.
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