6/24/15: The Cause of, and Solution to, All of Life’s Problems

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'80s comedies, ad agencies, advertising agency, advertising industry, Alan C. Peterson, Alar Aedma, alcoholism, Allan Weisbecker, alternate title, bad films, battle of the sexes, Beer, Bill Butler, Bill Conti, brewery, cinema, comedies, David Alan Grier, David Wohl, Dick Shawn, directorial debut, film reviews, films, homophobia, husband-wife relationship, Kenneth Mars, Loretta Swit, masculinity, Mel Brooks, misogyny, Movies, Norbecker, offensive films, over-the-top, Patrick Kelly, Peter Michael Goetz, racist, Rip Torn, satire, Saul Stein, sexist, silly films, spoof, The Selling of America, TV ads, unlikely heroes, William Russ

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that manages to genuinely surprise me, for one reason or another. It might be a film that’s surprisingly good or even unexpectedly great. It might be a “sure thing” that fails miserably, maybe something by a beloved filmmaker that manages to completely miss the mark. On very rare occasions, a movie might surprise with an unexpectedly thought-provoking concept or some heretofore unexplored insights into the human condition. And then, of course, there’s Beer (1985), also known by the much more on-the-nose title The Selling of America.

In this particular case, Beer surprises by being one of the most outrageously misguided, casually offensive films that I think I’ve ever seen. Coming across as a completely tone-deaf attempt to emulate the societal critique of Mel Brooks’ immortal Blazing Saddles (1974), Kelly’s film is stuffed to bursting with so many outdated, honestly offensive observations on race, feminism, masculinity, nationality, gender and sexuality that it makes something like Porky’s (1982) seem progressive. Beer is a “have your cake and eat it, too” kind of film, a movie that wants to shake a finger at society’s ills while gleefully indulging in the same sort of bad behavior.

A.J. Norbecker (Mel Brooks mainstay Kenneth Mars) has a bit of a problem: the German-born brewery owner is experiencing an unprecedented drop in sales and he places the blame squarely on the advertising agency that’s handling his promotional material. As Norbecker sees it, all beer is just “piss-water”: it’s the ads that really make the difference and he wants ads as cool as Miller and the other major players. To that end, he gives the agency’s president, Harley Feemer (Peter Michael Goetz), an ultimatum: beef up their campaign, increase his sales or lose their biggest client.

Behind the scenes, Feemer and the other guys try, in vain, to come up with anything original. Leave it to B.D. Tucker (M.A.S.H.’s Loretta Swit), the agency’s “token female executive” (their phrase, of course) to come up with the only good idea: they need an ad campaign that will appeal to the common, everyday man who’s the actual market for Norbecker Beer…nothing posh, highfalutin’ or pretentious, just a bunch of normal, macho guys drinking beer. Hiring her old friend, former hotshot director/current washed-up alcoholic Buzz Beckerman (Rip Torn, consuming scenery like a black hole), B.D. goes about putting together the ad campaign that will reset Norbecker’s fortune and secure her own future.

As luck would have it, B.D. and Buzz find their ideal spokesmen when they witness a trio of doofuses accidentally stop an attempted robbery in a dive bar. The three guys are perfect for their purposes, mostly because they’re not real people so much as generic templates: Merle (William Russ) is a good-ol’-boy (complete with steer horns on his Cadillac) fish out of water in big, bad New York City; Frankie (Saul Stein) is an Italian-American construction worker with a raging libido and the kind of enormous, stereotypical Italian family that passes around bowls of pasta large enough to drown in; and Elliot (David Alan Grier) is an uber-nerdy black lawyer who gets pushed around at his blatantly racist firm and fights a losing battle, at home, to prevent his young son from listening to boomboxes (no, really).

In no time at all, Merle, Frankie and Elliot are national heroes and superstars: all men want to be them and all women want to bed them, which is quite a change from their former loser/unemployed statuses. With new-found fame, however, comes a whole new raft of problems. Merle begins to feel a loss of identity and pines for the simpler life, Frankie develops erectile dysfunction just as he becomes a sex symbol and formerly nice-guy Elliot is starting to treat his wife and kid like crap. As the men become more and more wrapped-up in their manufactured personas, their real selves begin to fall by the wayside.

As the campaign continues to pick up steam, B.D. looks to find new ways to keep her manufactured stars in the media spotlight, mostly by injecting some all-important sex appeal into the proceedings (“Whip out your Norbecker…Beer!). With feminists around the country in an uproar, Norbecker Beer becomes more popular than ever, cornering a whopping 50% of the U.S. market. Norbecker, obviously ecstatic, sets his sights a little higher: he decides that he wants to take over the European market, as well, believing that a “surprise advertising blitz” will allow him to take over Germany (his first name is Adolph, after all). Will our hapless heroes end up losing their very humanity, becoming as callous and ruthless as the Madison Avenue execs that made them what they are? Will B.D. ever earn the respect that she so desperately wants? Will Adolph conquer Europe? Whip out your Norbecker and find out for yourself!

Make no bones about it: Beer (or The Selling of America, whichever you prefer) is an absolute mess, albeit a fascinating one. The biggest, most obvious issue with the film is that director Patrick Kelly (on his sole production, apparently) and screenwriter Allan Weisbecker (who also wrote an episode of Miami Vice) have absolutely no grasp on the supposedly satirical material whatsoever. Beer ends up in that nebulous “no-man’s-land” between pointing out the systematic stupidity of things like sexism and racism and actively upholding said prejudicial viewpoints. It’s the equivalent of someone who goes out of their way to explain that they aren’t racist before busting out the most virulently racist joke you’ve ever heard. It’s the “feminist” who drops a wink while telling women to get back into the kitchen, the “progressive” who thinks the term “twinkletoes” is a perfectly acceptable descriptor for a gay man.

Time and time again, the film seems to be attempting to poke holes in these very real issues while also attempting to milk them for easy, shallow laughs, many of which end up being more than a little mean-spirited. At one point, B.D. tells Elliot that he isn’t “black enough,” so he goes home and watches a handy “black studies” videotape, picking up such important tips as grabbing his crotch, swaggering and walking around with a boombox. When he shows up to the next shoot looking like an extra from Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1985), B.D. is absolutely shocked: “You look like you just stepped out of the ghetto! When I said ‘black,’ I didn’t mean ‘black-black’!” Funny shit, right?

Or how about the thoroughly “fresh” way in which Frankie’s entire family seems to have stepped out of a dinner-theater version of Mama Mia, complete with endless shouting and fainting when our friendly mook reveals that he plans to move out of their unbelievably crowded apartment? He’s only 29, after all, which is way too early for a good Italian boy to cut the apron strings. Frankie’s also such a completely irresistible ladies’ man that even when he can’t get it up, his conquest-of-the-moment blames it all on herself, begging him profusely for the opportunity to “do better” and not “disappoint him.” Whatta guy, right?

We even get a heart-warming, climatic scene where Merle and Frankie must wade into the “horrors” of a gay bar and “rescue” poor, drunk Elliot from a fate worse than death: that the scene devolves into the kind of rousing fist fight that would be more at home in Road House (1989) probably goes a long way towards indicating where the filmmakers sympathies lie. Never fear, however: it’s all balanced when ol’ Norbecker decides to market a new “lite” beer to gay men. As we see him cavort with a bunch of half-naked men in a sauna, he delivers the immortal pitch-line: “You can take it in the bottle or you can take it in the can.” Because, you know, “can” is also used as a slang word for “butt” and that’s kind of funny, right?

Truth be told, not much in Beer is actually funny, though nearly all of it is pitched at the kind of frantic, hysterical pace that usually denotes slapstick comedy. There are moments that manage to shine through the mess: the various TV commercials are actually pretty good and Buzz gets in a great line about how he once made Alan Ladd look “six feet tall” (I’m a movie nerd: that’s the kind of reference that makes me chuckle, sadly enough). The acting is also just fine (or, at the very least, it’s all of a piece with the film’s overall tone), with fantastic turns from David Alan Grier (in a very thankless role) and Loretta Swit (in an even more thankless role).

While I frequently found myself cringing during the film, my heart really went out to poor Swit: she really is a great actress and she gives the performance her all but it’s a ruthlessly stacked deck, from the get-go. Nothing about the character of B.D. really makes sense (at one point, she actively fights against sexualizing the ads, only to flip-flop a moment later) and the filmmakers seem bound and determined to humiliate her as much as possible. Rather than letting B.D. succeed, since she mounted a successful ad campaign and won a coveted CLEO award, we instead get the pathetic culmination where Merle comes to his senses and decides to leave, spurring B.D. to bed him to stay: “Do I have to get down on my knees,” she asks, with her tone and body language pointing to the obvious.

Turning B.D. into the butt of the film’s joke actually manages to sum up the movie’s problems in a pretty good nutshell: while Beer makes noises about tackling issues like sexism, racism and masculinity, it’s pretty clear that its sympathies lie elsewhere. The feminist protesters are portrayed as shrill nuts, the gay men in the club are lascivious wolves, the German guy is power-mad and the only one who makes any sense is the guy who looks like he stepped out of an old Western. It’s a stacked deck, regardless of how ridiculous the prejudicial portrayals are: showcasing an eye-rollingly obvious example of racism isn’t the same thing as condemning or commenting on it, after all.

There will, undoubtedly, be many who would counter my observations with the rejoinder that Beer is nothing more than a typical, ’80s comedy (almost, but not quite, a sex comedy, to boot): was I really expecting any kind of astute observations on anything? I’ll freely admit that I never expected Beer to be a great film, nor even a particularly smart one. There’s nothing wrong with dumb, politically incorrect comedies: I saw more than my fair share of Police Academy and Porky’s movies, growing up, and I don’t consider myself to be a raging, misogynist beast. This is a very different era than 30 years ago (or even 10 years ago, to be honest) and certain mindsets have a tendency to look as quaint as museum setpieces in this day and age.

At the end of the day, however, Beer can really only be judged on its own merits. As a film, it’s silly, nonsensical, occasionally funny but, for the most part, resoundingly lunk-headed. With too many detours into genuine racism and sexism to have much modern value, Beer/The Selling of America will probably best be remembered as a curio, a representation of a time when films could flaunt flagrant stereotypes, all in the guise of “making a statement.” Don’t be fooled, though: the only statement here is that this Beer is warm, flat and skunky.

2/2/15 (Part Two): No Justice…Just Us

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Alejandra Yañez, Alejandro Fernández Almendras, Ariel Mateluna, based on a true story, bullies, Cape Fear, Chilean films, cinema, Daniel Antivilo, Daniel Candia, Death Wish, divorced parents, family, family in crisis, father-son relationships, fighting back, film reviews, films, foreign films, forest ranger, guilt, harassment, ineffectual cops, Inti Briones, Jennifer Salas, justice, masculinity, Movies, Pablo Vergara, rape, revenge, set in Chile, Straw Dogs, thugs, To Kill a Man, vigilante, vigilantism, writer-director-editor

Most of the time, cinematic evil is pretty flashy, memorable and, let’s face it, kinda cool: it’s the Bond super-villain plotting the world’s destruction from the comfort of his high-tech, fortified island estate…the suave, dastardly mustache-twirler butting heads with the hardy hero…the badass monster with acid for blood and a hankering for humans…the evil genius who’s constantly building killer robots, turning people into zombies and infecting the water supply with some sort of designer mega-virus. Take a minute to think about which characters in any Nightmare on Elm Street film are more interesting: the bland, anonymous victims or wise-crackin’, ultra-cool Freddy? Evil may be something to overcome (most of the time) but that doesn’t mean it can’t be gussied up with some sweet duds and an enviable haircut.

In the real world, however, true evil is rarely as “cool” as movies make it out to be. In fact, true evil, for the most part, is exceptionally banal: it’s the bureaucrat moving “casualties” from one column to the next…the terrorist who kills based on dogma…the egomaniacal dictator who rules by virtue of having the most guns, not the best plan…the bored thrill-seekers just looking for something to do…the bullies who indiscriminately target the weak in an effort to make someone’s, anyone’s life more miserable than their own…the fat cats who relentlessly pad their own wallets at the expense of those around them…the companies dumping pollutants into the water and air. Real evil, for the most part, is boring, beige. True evil is also all but impossible to eradicate: you may be able to send in Rambo or Jason Bourne to take care of the cinematic baddies but it doesn’t work quite like that in the real world. Most of us are in no position to eliminate the day-to-day evils of the world: evil, like good, is just a fact of life.

Alejandro Fernández Almendras’ To Kill a Man (2014), which the Chilean director also wrote and edited, takes us right into the thick of real evil, showcasing the casual cruelty, misanthropy and harassment that often leads to violence, heart-break and death. There are no heroes here, just a desperate, broken-down father who tries (and fails) to protect his family. There are no super-villains, either, no suave harbingers of cool chaos for us to vicariously live through: the evil in To Kill a Man is earth-bound, sweaty, stupid and ugly, the product of generations of degradation, not a special serum or radioactive infection. There is nothing rousing, fist-raising or “epic” about the fight between good and evil in Almendras’ film: this is real evil, in all of its slouching, misshapen glory. There are no happy endings here because, in the real world, evil is seldom vanquished: it simply returns to the soil, like so much rot, in order to spring anew elsewhere. By removing feel-good notions of cosmic justice and the supposed balance between good and evil, Almendras lifts up the rock that is our world and let the hidden things spill out into the light: in the process, he creates one of the most powerful, tense and unpleasant films of the year, a funeral dirge for our modern age.

The protagonist of our little film, Jorge (Daniel Candia), is a mild-mannered forest ranger, father of two and loving husband. He’s soft-spoken, diabetic, gets his family whatever they want at the drop of a hat and seems like a genuinely nice guy. As with Paul Kersey in Death Wish (1974), however, this is not the kind of world for a meek, kind-hearted push-over: this is the jungle and the weaker animals are always prey for the stronger. In this case, the stronger animal is one Luis Alberto Alamos Alamos (Daniel Antivilo), also known as Kalule. Kalule and his gang of reprobates have recently taken over a small park in Jorge’s neighborhood and currently “rule” with an iron fist. No one is safe from their harassment, petty larceny and thuggish violence: think a meaner, stupider and crasser version of Alex’s droogs and you’ve on the right track.

One night, while passing through the park on his way home from work, Jorge happens to run afoul of Kalule and his “boys.” At first, the thugs just harass the poor guy, kicking a soccer ball at him, calling him names and cheerfully menacing him. When Jorge is forced to go back through the park later, however, in order to buy his son, Jorge (Ariel Mateluna) and his friends some beer, his second meeting with the gang isn’t quite as “pleasant.” The creeps surround Jorge, push him around and snatch his wallet, taking what they want and throwing the rest into the dirt. The scene is terrible and humiliating, with Jorge as defenseless as a small child, despite his status as patriarch of his household. To add insult to injury, Kalule refuses to take Jorge’s credit card (“I’d probably have to pay your bill,” he laughs) but does take the expensive blood tester that Jorge needs to help control his diabetes.

When Jorge gets home, he’s too devastated to even look his family in the eyes. His wife, Marta (Alejandra Yañez), and daughter, Nicole (Jennifer Salas), seem mortified and his son is pissed off and ready for action: he wants his dad to give him 5000 pesos so that he can go to the gang and, at the very least, negotiate the return of his dad’s tester. Jorge tells him to drop it which, of course, has the opposite desired effect: young Jorge sneaks out while his parents sleep and attempts to get his dad’s stuff back. When he finds out, Jorge rushes after his son, only to get to his side right after Kalule has shot him. While he watches, Kalule calmly shoots himself and then calls the police, claiming that Jorge’s son attacked him and he only shot in self-defense.

At the trial, Kalule continues to plead his innocence, even as he accepts a plea deal that would put him in prison for 1.5 years. Jorge’s family, for their part, is heartbroken: young Jorge has survived but his injuries have put an end to his schooling, dooming him to the same sort of lower-class life as his parents. Marta, meanwhile, has never stopped blaming Jorge for their son’s injury and the couple have since divorced, with the kids staying with their mother and Jorge taking up residence in a flea-bag motel. Faster than you can say “Cape Fear (1991),” however, Kalule is out of jail and looking to even the score with Jorge and his family. The thug begins a campaign of terror and harassment against the family that includes obscene phone calls, throwing rocks at their house and stalking young Nicole everywhere she goes. The police, so unhelpful during the original crime, are just as unhelpful now: regardless of how many complaints the family lodges, how many protection orders they get or how much they try to avoid Kalule and his gang, the authorities merely shrug their shoulders, leaving the family completely on their own.

As the pressure begins to wear on him, Jorge finds himself changing in subtle ways. After a confrontation with an asshole in the forest ends with Jorge chasing him off with a shotgun, however, the beleaguered father begins to feel empowered, if only ever so slightly. After Kalule and his men commit a shocking, vile and humiliating act against his daughter, however, Jorge finds himself at a crossroads: will he be able to continue taking the “high road,” hoping that the police will eventually do their job, or will he take matters into his own hands and try to make his own version of “justice?” When he finally does make a choice, Jorge’s decision will have a terrible, lasting impact on all those around him: there are no winners, here, only various shades of losers and wrecked human beings.

Lean, mean and consistently down-trodden, To Kill a Man is one of the finest examples of “feel bad” cinema I’ve seen in some time. Everything about the film is calculatedly to make the viewer feel as tense and uncomfortable as possible: the ominous score, all deep-voiced wind instruments and droning, low tones crawls under your skin and stays there…the violence, when it happens, is sudden, shocking and all-too realistic…the gang seem all-powerful and absolutely immoral, lending the film an overriding sense of futility…in every way possible, To Kill a Man is the epitome of a stacked deck.

Jorge, as portrayed by Candia, is a sympathetic, yet largely pathetic, character, a man who wants to believe in some notion of balance and justice yet keeps getting kicked in the nuts by the universe at every turn. Yañez, for her part, serves as surrogate for anyone taking the view that bullies need to be stood up to: the scene where Marta sneers at Jorge and warns him to beware of “mean kids in the park” is a real heart-breaker, since it just reinforces the notion that Jorge was too weak and not “masculine enough” to protect his family. We witness young Jorge go from the traditionally supportive son to a bitter, jaded shell of a man who holds his father in the same contempt that his mother does. And poor Nicole, so hopeful and positive, is absolutely destroyed by the violence and misogyny that swirls around her like a toxic cloud. This isn’t a family so much as three horses which, along with Kalule, are striving to pull Jorge to pieces.

While the acting is consistently strong and nicely understated, the cinematography, courtesy of Inti Briones, is a real thing of beauty. Time after time, Briones comes up with some truly gorgeous images: the shot of an automatic door slowly closing, only to stop midway, works on a number of levels, as does the awesome shot of Jorge’s truck disappearing backwards into the night, its wan headlights gradually swallowed in the same manner as Jorge’s rapidly dwindling humanity. The sense of framing is exquisite and the frequent close-ups, shot from odd angles, keep the constantly shifting power relationships as off-kilter as possible. As difficult as To Kill a Man is to sit through, content-wise, the film always looks and sounds amazing, a razor blade wrapped in a candy shell.

Ultimately, I was pretty blown away by Almendras’ film: while I’ve never been the biggest fan of what I like to call “hopeless cinema,” it’s impossible to deny the raw power of To Kill a Man. In many ways, the film is a modern successor to Death Wish, a searing, jagged examination of the destructive power of vengeance and what it means to be a “protector” in these violent times. While Jorge’s measured march to his own annihilation is painful to watch, it’s the kind of pain that any cinephile should force themselves to endure. At its core, To Kill a Man peels back humanity’s skin, revealing the coal-black heart that beats beneath. You may not necessarily “enjoy” the film but truth, like life, is often painful. Sometimes, you need that pain to appreciate everything else. Sometimes, that’s all there is.

1/1/15 (Part Three): Down the Mountain, Off the Cliff

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avalanches, bad decisions, bad fathers, Best of 2014, Brady Corbet, cinema, Clara Wettergren, dark comedies, dramas, dysfunctional family, family vacations, Fanni Metelius, favorite films, film reviews, films, Force Majeure, foreign films, Fredrik Wenzel, French Alps, friends, Johannes Kuhnke, Karin Myrenberg, Kristofer Hivju, Lisa Loven Kongsli, marriage, masculinity, Movies, nature, Ruben Östlund, ski vacation, Swedish films, troubled marriages, Vincent Wettergren, writer-director

During the second day of a five-day ski vacation in the French Alps, a family of four happens to get lunch at their resort’s crowded, slope-side cafe. As they sit down to enjoy their meal, a nearby controlled explosion backfires and sends what seems to be an entire mountain-worth of snow surging towards the outdoor cafe: as the avalanche gets closer, crowds of panicked people flee in every direction, chaos incarnate. As Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) struggles to protect and comfort her children, Harry (Vincent Wettergren) and Vera (Clara Wettergren), she calls out for her husband, Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke), to no avail: turns out the family’s patriarch ran like hell as soon as the avalanche started, stopping only long enough to grab his phone and sunglasses. After the dust clears (literally), we see that the cascading mass of snow has stopped well short of the cafe: crisis averted, no one injured, everybody as you were. As Tomas sheepishly retakes his seat, however, the shocked stares from his disbelieving wife and kids are much louder than the mountain-side detonations: the next three days are going to feel like years…and not particularly good ones, at that.

This lapse of parental/spousal support forms the crux of writer-director Ruben Östlund’s brittle, frigidly humorous Force Majeure (2014), a thorny examination of the changing nature of gender roles, the passive-aggressive ways in which spouses needle at each other and the subtle ways in which self-preservation is as much a learned skill as an inherent instinct. While precious little about Östlund’s film is laugh-out-loud funny, there’s an ironic tilt to the film’s cap that belies the seemingly black-and-white nature of its subject: by their very natures, human are absurd animals and any attempt to bring order to the absurdity just makes it that much more absurd.

From the jump, Östlund drops subtle hints about the true nature of Tomas and Ebba’s relationship: she dotes on the children but seems decidedly less focused on her husband, he’s on a much-needed vacation from work but still spends an inordinate amount of time checking his phone. There seems to be a disconnect between the two long before Tomas’ act of cowardice tosses everything wholesale over the falls, leaving us to believe that this wasn’t the only straw, just the one that snapped the camel in two.

In certain ways, Force Majeure echoes Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) in that much of the external conflict between Tomas and Ebba stems from a fundamental difference in their versions of events at the cafe: Tomas firmly believes that he did not, in fact, run away, even though the video evidence is right on the phone that he managed to grab. As Tomas continues to push his version of events, his nit-picking and wheedling has the effect of making Ebba seem like an idiot, which only serves to push the two further apart.

Östlund expands the tableau out a little with the inclusion of Fanni (Fanni Metelius) and Mats (Kristofer Hivju), old friends of Tomas and Ebba’s who also find themselves at the same resort. As the couple attempts to rope their friends into supporting their individual versions of events, age difference starts to play a part: Mats and Tomas are older than Fanni and Ebba, which explains why Ebba jumped into action and Tomas didn’t. If Fanni and Mats had been on the slopes that day, Fanni posits, they would have reacted the exact same way. Cue Mat’s wounded masculine ego as he steadfastly disputes his wife’s assumption about his possible heroic tendencies. In no time at all, the two couples are at each other’s throats, with the women seeking to support each other while the men seek to reaffirm their stricken masculinity on the mountain-side in any way possible. Meanwhile, neither Harry nor Vera can even look their parents in the eye: as far as they’re concerned, everybody fucked up and assigning blame is sort of moot…from the mouths of babes, eh?

Concise, intimate and dedicated to the difficult relationship issues that others might gloss over, Östlund’s Force Majeure is quite the piece of art, aloof and emotionless as it might be. While it would have been the easiest thing possible to vilify Tomas, Östlund isn’t interested in any facile, easy answers: rather, he uses the film’s conclusion as a way to flip the script, indicting Ebba’s judgment in the same way that Tomas’ was impugned earlier. There are no easy answers in crisis situations, he seems to be saying, and any hard-and-fast rules are largely without merit: men and women will do what they will do, regardless of how “right” or “wrong” it is.

In a day and age when the very notions of masculinity and femininity are being redefined on a near constant basis, Force Majeure examines the issue from a multifaceted approach: age, gender and societal expectations all play a role in what transpires…remove any one factor, Östlund seems to be saying, and the whole complicated mess comes tumbling straight to the ground. Nowhere is this point made more evident than the scene where Mats and Tomas hit the slopes together, only to suffer another wound to their egos at the hands of a seemingly flirtatious female skier: as the situation escalates from amusing to awkward to rather horrible, it’s as if Östlund is giving us a short survey on the various ways in which men and women (poorly) interact. Despite being established as the “better” version of Tomas, Mats ends up being just as ridiculous and over-reactive as his friend when the chips are down.

One of the most interesting discussions in the film involves the old-fashioned patriarchal notion of the father/husband as “protector” of the family. If one were to apply modern conceptions of gender neutrality on the issue, Tomas would be no more responsible for solely “protecting” his family than Ebba would be solely responsible for nurturing them. Under this ideal, Tomas may not have acted heroically but he was acting instinctively, as a human animal. Tomas’ actions only prove explicitly cowardly if one examines his actions under the guise of traditional patriarchy/masculinity: as an “old-school” father/husband, Tomas is a roaring failure, putting his own concerns and safety above those of the family he’s sworn to protect. In a way, Östlund gets to work both sides of the argument with equal aplomb, right down to the finale, which re-frames the “protector” role in a way that makes Ebba the deficient one, not Tomas. It’s dirty pool, in a way, but really opens the film up to examination and interpretation from a number of angles.

So…Force Majeure is one of the cleverest, most cutting and insightful films of the year…is it actually a good film, though? In reality, Östlund’s film isn’t just good: it actually borders on the “quite extraordinary” end of things. For one thing, Force Majeure may have the single best cinematography of the year, with the possible exception of Wes Anderson’s exceptional Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Cinematographer Fredrik Wenzel fashions some truly jaw-dropping shots: with brilliant azure skies, pristine white snow and brightly colored accents like the vibrant red location markers, Force Majeure is absolute and complete eye candy. There are a couple of nighttime mountain shots that are nothing short of stunning (the one with the toy airplane is pretty enough to hang in a museum) and the mountain setting has a grandeur and immensity to it that the whole experience becomes rather humbling: when compared to the beautifully rugged natural worlds, Tomas, Ebba, their kids (and us) are really just about as small and insignificant as it gets.

While Kuhnke is solid as the increasingly childish Tomas (his temper tantrum/breakdown is really something to behold), Kongsli’s turn as Ebba is the real meat of the matter: her slow-burn evolution from slightly put-upon to completely shattered would be heartbreaking if Östlund hadn’t muddied the water enough to offer some shades of doubt. There are moments during Force Majeure where Kuhnke and Kongsli deliver mountains worth of character development without uttering so much as a word: in particular, Östlund uses the family’s nightly ablutions to subtly portray the disintegration of the family unit, from happy unit to miserable individuals. It’s a wonderfully cinematic effect and one of the many little details that make Östlund’s film so constantly fascinating.

Despite how much I liked and respected Force Majeure, there were still a couple of issues that didn’t sit quite right with me. From a technical standpoint, I wasn’t big on the occasional switches to a 1st-person POV: these tended to take me out of the story and I couldn’t really see any notable reason for the affectation. It was actually one of the few points in the film that felt like style for style’s sake, which might be why it stuck out so much. I also felt that the film could, on occasion, get a little heavy-handed: by the final reel, there’s so much hand-wringing and distraught emotions that the formerly chilly film runs the risk of getting a little too over-heated. Finally, while I appreciated the ironic intent behind the final “twist,” it also had the effect of sending the movie off without any real sort of conclusion. Not a critical blow, mind you, since Östlund’s intent is pretty clear. For my money, however, the finale felt more like a non-committal shrug than the decisive statement that the film seemed to be building up to. It worked, ultimately, but could have hit quite a bit harder, as far as I’m concerned.

Ultimately, however, any quibbles are just that: minor irritations that do nothing to sully the overall positive impression of the film. Force Majeure is the kind of knotty, intelligent and quietly subversive independent film that we could use a whole lot more of: when the external explosions match the internal detonations, Force Majeure is just about as perfect an examination of a troubled marriage as one could find. In the end, deciding Tomas’ ultimate level of culpability will depend on lots of factors, not the least of which is the individual ideas and “baggage” that individual viewers bring to the proceedings. Determining Ruben Östlund’s abilities as a formidable filmmaker, however, is a much easier task: one simply needs to open their eyes and the proof is right there on the screen, for everyone to see.