[yasr_overall_rating]
During a routine mission, Company commander Claus M. Pedersen and his soldiers are caught in heavy crossfire and in order to save his men, Claus makes a decision that has grave consequences for him – and his family back home.
While I was watching Tobias Lindholm’s Oscar-nominated drama “A War,” a scene from Ricky Gervais’ bitingly satirical British show “Extras” came into my mind. Gervais plays one of the titular extras. In one episode, he encounters Kate Winslet on the set of a ridiculously over-the-top Holocaust drama. When he inquiries why she’s doing it, Kate’s response is something in the vein of, “It’s a guaranteed Oscar.” Lo and behold, in a bit of meta-reality clash, just a few years later Winslet received the golden statue for Holocaust drama “The Reader” – a frankly mediocre film that got a lot of Academy attention, most certainly due to its controversial subject matter.
Now, Lindholm’s latest directorial feature is definitely less emotionally manipulative and glossed-over than Stephen Daldry’s by-product of adhering to Academy expectations. It’s a Serious Drama whose focal point is not the war in Afghanistan, but a man at war with himself, challenged to recollect an event that defies rationale. Yet I never felt true originality or incisiveness; beat-by-beat, the story feels rehashed, already covered, to various degrees of success, in many films, from William Friedkin’s “Rules of Engagement” to Susanne Bier’s “Brothers.” It’s all very familiar, but well-told by a capable cast and director, with a subject matter – War Itself – ripe for Academy picking.
Michael Shannon-lookalike Pilou Asbæk plays Claus, leader of a small troop of Danish soldiers stationed in the vast, open mountains of Afghanistan, whose sheer enormity and grandeur are gracefully portrayed by cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck. The DP switches between those admiring shots of nature, and shaky, “you-are-there” moments of intense combat, as well as Claus’ wife Maria’s (Tuva Novotny) grey-hued, solitary existence back at home in Denmark. She lives with their three children, in constant anticipation of her husband’s call, which weighs heavily upon the family.
One day, Claus and his soldiers encounter an Afghan family, in need of medical assistance. This leads to a prolonged, and steadily mounting, conflict. “We’ll come tomorrow, we’ll secure the area, and we’ll drive the Taliban out,” Claus promises the family. This results in a disastrous confrontation and innocent victims. Claus is brought home and put on trial for the dubiousness of his actions, while Maria observes, firmly believing in the virtue of his orders, and even of the orders that may or may not have been given to him at a crucial point. Early in the film, Claus justifies their actions to his traumatized soldiers by claiming they are liberating civilians – by the end, he is put through the ultimate grinder, a reminder that no such action can truly be justified.
Tobias Lindholm wrote the brilliant “The Hunt” for fellow Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that the film is sharp: it covers a lot of issues, the prevailing one being a lack of communication when it comes to war – communication between loved ones, communication between commanders, communication between man and himself. The verisimilitude is there, Lindholm getting the minute details right, down to the terminology: “Commander? He must mean CO”, one of the soldiers muses. Men are known merely as “7-5”’s and “0-2”’s. “A War” displays how an event of such enormity – the deaths of civilian lives – can be reduced to a simple term, such as “PID”, which basically means “visual on the target.” Among all this simplification, the unattainable answer lies in a manner of interpretation: what, exactly, did Claus mean when he said, “Tell them I know who’s in there”?
There are several highlights worth noting. A scared soldier wants to go home, but all Claus can do is reassure him with a cigarette. A child accidentally ingests a bottle of pills and goes through a painful-to-watch medical procedure. A sequence involving a group of children, a sniper and a biker is the most striking one – the sniper hums before taking a shot, and our hearts skip as he pulls the trigger.
Yet, like Vinterberg with the recent well-made but middling “Far From the Madding Crowd,” Lindholm seems to have gone a bit soft, “A War” lacking bite, of all things. While, say, Lars von Trier still shocks and provokes and screws with your mind with films like “Nymphomaniac” and “Melancholia,” this war flick just stirs it a little.
What aggravated me the most was how poorly the two stories – Claus’ and Maria’s – gelled, her subplot underdeveloped in comparison to the visceral war scenes. When the plots merge in the second half, the film loses drive, becoming a courtroom procedural (another staple Hollywood loves). Pilou Asbæk conveys a storm of emotion with subtlety while on trial, but it’s repetitive and talky, like a vice-versa “Full Metal Jacket,” in which the first half’s talky scenes were masterful, while the second half’s war scenes dragged.
Yes, war is terrible and dehumanizing and unnecessary, filled with casualties, and has physical and emotional repercussions, but we all know that, right? Perhaps “A War”’s intelligence and passionate execution IS its novelty, but I’d like to think that we still live in a world where those aspects are a given, not Oscar-worthy commendable traits. There are foreign films out there that stirred a war of emotions within me in 2015 with a single shot – Abderrahmane Sissako’s “Timbuktu” comes to mind – but “A War” left me somewhat cold. With all due respect.
In select theaters in New York and Los Angeles Friday, February 12th with a national rollout to follow
