Is an-eye-for-an-eye the right way to live? Is turning the other cheek a correct way to build relationships? Or do we just stagger through life, blind and slap-happy, in a search for proper behavior? "In a Better World," the Danish movie that won the Academy Award for best foreign-languge film and which opens here today, tries to deal with the subject but is often overwhelmed by it.
Anton (Mikael Persbrandt) is a Swedish doctor living in a small Danish town, working for a charitable group and traveling back and forth to Africa, where violence and death are constant companions. At the end of the day, Anton and his fellow workers ride out of the medical compound to, no doubt, air-conditioned quarters.
At home Anton is struggling through a separation; his wife, Marianne (Trine Dyrholm) having left after discovering an affair. There are two sons, too, and the elder, Elias (Markus Rygaard), is distressed by this and by constant bullying by classmates (I never knew there was anti-Swedish sentiment in Denmark). A savior arrives in Christian (William Johnk Nielsen), another classmate, who hammers the chief bully with a bicycle tire pump. Christian is a rather smirky kid, bright, egotistic and hounded by the recent death of his mother and by his father's frequent business trips to London. I also got the impression that director Susanne Bier occasionally alluded to an affair between Anton and Christian's mother.
When a garage mechanic and Anton argue over a playground swing, Christian decides to get revenge and show Elias how to stand up for himself. With violence continuing in Africa and serving as a counterpoint to Christian's machinations, the downhill spiral begins. Bier and writer Anders Thomas Jensen have all sorts of good intentions in presenting a paean to peace and civilization in a violent world, but the result is too long and too preachy.
In a Better World opens today at the Plaza Frontenac.
–Joe