That the second iteration of True Grit has
recently proved to be such a hit, even winning an Academy Award
nomination as Best Picture, shows how the world of classic
Hollywood somehow manages to live on in spite of all the formidable
cultural forces now arrayed against it. Where in our culture today,
except in the movies, is it any longer possible to present without
irony a straightforward quest for revenge as something like what it
was in the Hobbesian state of nature of Old Hollywood: that is, not
only permissible but compulsory. True, the postmodern idiom in
which today’s movies are couched has done much to rob such a
revenge saga of its moral force and justification. As Tony Soprano
says to his son A.J. about The Godfather, “Jesus Christ,
A.J.…It’s a movie!” But if the culture draws back from the
primitive grandeur of the theme, the movie itself
doesn’t.
To me, that’s something to cheer about, because the
pseudo-profundities of New or Revisionist Hollywood — which tends
to produce movies like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992)
or Mystic
River (2003) that are tedious
moralizing tracts against revenge — have never had much appeal.
It’s so easy for film-makers with an ambition to be seen as “deep”
or “thoughtful” to stack the deck against revenge seekers by making
their would-be victims into pathetic and pitiable creatures who
often (as in Mystic River) aren’t even guilty of the deeds
for which they are being called on to pay the ultimate price. This
is what Hans Petter Moland is doing, too, in the Norwegian movie
A Somewhat Gentle Man (En ganske snill mann),
though with rather more subtlety and a lot more humor than
usual.
Stellan Skarsgård (Breaking
the Waves, Pirates of the Caribbean) plays Ulrik, a
hulking, taciturn auto mechanic who has just been released from
prison after doing 12 years for the murder of his wife’s lover.
Before being sent away, he had worked as a tough-guy enforcer for
Rune Jensen (Bjørn Floberg), a gangster
who ran a stolen-car ring and who now welcomes him back with a job
and a place to live — and the expectation that he will be as eager
as Rune himself is to take his revenge on the “little snitch” Kenny
(Henrik Mestad) who turns out to be the brother of the man Ulrik
murdered and whose testimony had sent him up the river. Ulrik’s
massive passivity makes him naturally fall in at first with the
revenge plot that Rune begins to organize against Kenny, but we
find ourselves turning our attention instead to the job and the
place to live. The former is as a mechanic working for a bizarrely
philosophical garage owner named Sven
(Bjørn Sundquist). “Summer tires, winter
tires. The world must keep turning, that’s how I see it,” says
Sven. The latter is a room hardly to be distinguished from the
prison cell Ulrik has just left in the home of Rune’s sister, Karen
Margrethe (Jorunn Kjellsby), who is also Sven’s ex-wife.
Ulrik’s involvement with these two remarkable characters
plays out like a comedy. Or, rather, like a peculiarly Nordic
tragi-comedy whose tragic dimension is represented by Rune and his
revenge plot. They are like the gun which, if casually introduced
in the first act of a play, Chekhov said had to be fired by the end
of it. This is known in the trade as the rule of Chekhov’s gun, and
there may be an allusion to this in the comic scene when Ulrik and
Rune and the latter’s not entirely sycophantic henchman Rolf (Gard
B. Eidsvold) go to buy a gun from a Lappish arms dealer and his
dwarf assistant — just as there may also be an allusion to
South Park in the fact that the name of the man the gun is
to be used on (or not) is Kenny.
The other players in this comedy include Sven’s
receptionist Merete (Jannike Kruse) and her violently abusive
ex-husband, Kristian (Jon Øigarden),
Ulrik’s ex-wife Wenche (Kjersti Holmen) and his now-grown son Geir
(Jan Gunnar Røise) who has been
instructed by Wenche to regard his father as dead, and Geir’s
fiancée Silje (Julia Bache-Wiig), who is expecting a child. Geir is
not unwilling to get to know his father again, but Silje is opposed
to welcoming a murderer into her home. “Her family doesn’t do stuff
like that,” Geir tells Ulrik apologetically. “They have a nursery
— you know, with plants? They have principles.” The best bits of
the movie have to do with the desperately lonely and unattractive
Karen Margrethe’s seduction of Ulrik, which I won’t spoil by
describing in detail, but it, together with the birth of Ulrik’s
grandson, casts an interesting light back on the revenge plot, once
it is finally put into motion. Not surprisingly, when at length he
appears, Kenny turns out to be someone we don’t particularly want
to see dead while Rune is more and more someone we do.
There is some mild interest for the moralist in the fact
that, as opposed to revenge as the movie is, it is not opposed to
murder if the victim is unpleasant enough. Call me a pedant, but I
find this a logically inconsistent point of view. Movies like life
are overwhelmingly biased to the present and the way we see the
people in front of us, which makes it easy enough to take your
audience along with you if you make the prospective victim of
revenge merely pitiable and the man who insists on revenge a much
nastier customer. But in the end the film has no answer to the case
for revenge, which is impeccably put by Rune, unpleasant though he
is. “No man is stronger than his people,” says Rune. “If my people
are weak, then I look weak.” I guess Hans Petter Moland finds this
way of looking at the matter self-discrediting. I do
not.
