In a Better World

TedFlicks Rating:

$8.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

A FEATURE LENGTH ‘SEINFELD’ EPISODE WITHOUT THE JOKES

After winning the 2010 Oscar for best foreign language film, helmer Susanne Bier’s “In a Better World” is getting limited release in the US — following making the rounds of the word’s film festivals.  Making the film festival rounds nowadays is not exactly the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for a movie.  Most of the time it’s just the opposite.  Your critic has seen some of the worst cinematic dreck at film festivals.  They tend to be filled by movies that need distribution.  The reason they need distribution is that no one wanted to distribute them because they are sorely lacking in audience appeal.  Fortunately for the auds of “In a Better World” that is not entirely the case in this instance.

Filmmakers attempted to draw a parallel between violence in civilized society (Denmark) and violence in lawless parts of Africa.  In that regard it succeeds, but is premise is the law of unintended consequences.  In other words, it’s a feature length “Seinfeld” episode without the jokes — and “In a Better World” is totally devoid of humor — perhaps this is a Nordic trait.  Ingmar Bergmann made only one comedy in a very long career.

Pic’s remarkable achievement is the drawing the parallel between three storylines:  Two teenage boys who deal with a school bully; a doctor who encounters violence both in Denmark and in lawless Africa where he runs a clinic; and a really bad guy who contracts a life-threatening infection — sort of a warlord — who terrorizes folks who live in area served by the doctor’s clinic.  Skein interweaves the story lines to make a point.  Ultimately, however, the point is not made.  Pic’s ending is equivocal.  Therein lies its second problem.

There is a third problem:  Telegraphy.  Almost every plot development is telegraphed.  It is one thing to be clear and quite another to be redundant.  Bier errs on the side of redundancy.

Here’s the stew:  Mix a Danish kid from London (Christian well played by William Jøhnk Juels Nielsen) who has a beef against his dad over his mom’s recent death from cancer; a school geek with braces (Elias equally well played by Markus Rygaard); a school bully who regularly beats up Elias (Sofus played by Simon Maagaard Holm); a doctor with a fine sense of ethics (Anton, played by Mikael Persbrandt) who splits his time between Denmark and Africa and is also the dad of Elias; an extraordinarily righteous Marianne, the estranged wife of Anton and mother of Elias played by Trine Dyrholm); some vague allusion to Anton having cheated on his most righteous wife with some other woman whom we know not; a pugnacious automobile mechanic (Lars played by Kim Bodnia) who has unpleasant encounters with Anton and the young boys; and a truly sadistic African warlord known as Big Man (Odiege Matthew) who has an unpleasant habit of cutting open the bellies of pregnant women after taking bets with his gunmen on the gender of the baby; and Nordic ideas about pacifism.  Simmer for 119 minutes.

Christian’s dad takes him back from London to Denmark to live with grandma after mom’s death.  Enrolled in school, he bonds with Elias, the victim of the bully Sofus.  Elias takes the bullying without a fight.  Christian has a slightly different approach.  He beats the heck out of Sofus in the boys room with a tire pump and then puts a knife to his throat.  Winston Churchill would have been proud.  Sofus gets the cops involved.  The boys cover for each other.  The knife is not found.  School authorities make the boys shake hands.  Sofus appears to have turned over a new leaf.  So far so good.

But Christian, having tasted blood, likes it.  He becomes a sort of teenage Dirty Harry.  When Lars picks a fight with Anton, Christian decides to teach Lars a lesson.  Anton’s lesson to the boys is to turn the other cheek.  It is lost on Christian.  Anton clearly is physically capable of taking on Lars, but refuses to do so.  Lars is basically a blowhard who slaps people.  Back in the day, at least in New York, he’d be in a full body cast for about six months.  But in Scandinavia evidently that treatment is no longer in vogue.

Christian’s remedy is to make a pipe bomb of extraordinary force and to use it to blow up Lars’ van.  He coaxes Elias into the plot.  Along come two joggers just after the boys light the fuse, and Elias runs toward the blast to warn them off.  He suffers some serious injuries doing so.

Meanwhile, Anton, our apostle of non-violence, gets a patient at his African clinic.  It’s Big Man — escorted by a pickup truck full of guys wielding Kalashnikovs.  Big Man has acquired a deadly infection and wants Anton to treat him.  Anton does so over the opposition of his native nurses and doctors.  He also sets some conditions:  No weapons in the clinic; only two visitors at a time for Big Man.

Big Man is not exactly a star patient.  He’s about as popular at the clinic as Goebbels would be at a B’nai B’rith meeting.  And he does nothing to endear himself to anyone.  Just the opposite.  After a few days in hospital his minions bring him crutches.  He uses them to look in on one of his pregnant victims, a woman Anton could not save, brought into the clinic just at the right moment.  In doing so he utters the line the pushes Anton over the edge:  “Little pussy; big knife.  Maybe Omar can have her now.  He likes things that don’t move.”

Anton throws him out saying, “If you can walk, you have to leave.”  Resisting, Big Man falls off his crutches and into the hands of the husbands of the women he butchered.

Here is pic’s equivocation.  Anton is the epitome of non-violence.  Yet he leaves Big Man to certain death at the hands of an enraged mob.  Meanwhile, Christian, who made and set off a deadly pipe bomb, suffers little or no legal consequences.  In fact, he takes more heat for beating up the schoolyard bully, who richly deserved it.  And Sofus, the schoolyard bully, seems to have changed his ways after Christian knocked the stuffing out of him.

Subplots are neatly tied together in the editing by Pernille Bech Christensen and Morten Egholm.  Big Man is set up as Sofus on a grander scale.  Lars is a bully only to move the plot along.  Screenplay by Anders Thomas Jensen is probably too clear — auds are treated early on to a shot of Christian playing a violent computer game.  If that doesn’t telegraph his intentions what would?  Sound recording is excellent in that all the accented English dialogue is easy to understand.  Danish dialogue is subtitled.  And lensing by Morten Søborg is above par.  Pic’s 119 minutes do not drag, an admirable feat for a humorless melodrama.  Its “R” rating is most likely due to language, violence, and some pretty nasty shots of wounds in the African clinic.

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In a Better World on Netflix