|
Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
MAX MANUS: MAN OF WAR Unlike America, which hasn’t been occupied by a foreign invader since the War of 1812, most European countries have been beset by occupations in one form or another. Of course, Hitler overran most of the continent during World War II, and several recent films like Flame and Citroen (Denmark), Black Book (Netherlands), and Army of Crime (France) have dramatized the underground resistors fighting in those countries. We can now add the Norwegian epic Max Manus: Man of War to that list. The film introduces Max Manus, a real-life Norwegian hero who died in 1996 at age 81, while fighting the Soviets in Finland. After that battlefield debacle, he returns home to Norway to organize against the Nazi war machine. After Max is arrested by the Germans, he manages to escape from a heavily guarded hospital and makes it across the English Channel to train in Scotland before returning to lead a group of fighters in the ongoing life-or-death battle with the Germans. Directors Espen Sandberg and Joachim Ronning signal at the beginning that Max Manus will be more than merely a feel-good action romp about how the good guys won. The opening sequence, with Max enduring horrible Finnish winter conditions fighting the Red Army, unflinchingly presents the brutality and arbitrariness of wartime killing. Max’s return to Norway to join the Resistance gives the filmmakers the chance to detail how an initially ragtag group becomes a formidable force against the all-powerful Nazis, but Sandberg and Ronning admirably refrain from making a “stand up and cheer” thriller. Instead, the filmmakers again and again present war’s casual brutality, including a scene of a resistance fighter getting run over by a Nazi truck that looks remarkably realistic. (Max several times questions the meaning of war, even with right on his side, especially after the death of a close friend in a botched attack.) Even though the group’s successful sabotage exploits (blowing up buildings, train lines, ships) are chronicled with enthusiasm, the extreme violence is never skimped on. In a startling sequence of Max and his men bombing a building, the ear-shattering explosions and the screaming bystanders pouring out of the building give the film a documentary-like quality. Max Manus doesn’t completely avoid melodramatic clichés, however. Max meets-cute Tikken, a fellow resistance fighter (who would, after the war, become his wife and outlive him by 14 years). And the Norwegian Nazi leader, aptly named Siegfried, has the kind of matinee idol looks that make his brutal villainy even more swinish. Still, there’s much to admire in the film’s anti-heroic stance. When Max and Siegfried meet after the Nazis surrender (Siegfried is in awe of the young man he could never capture), Max realizes they are both victims of the indiscriminate insanity of war. This final showdown between our hero and his nemesis is deliberately anticlimactic, with no explosive gunplay or hand-to-hand combat that a lesser movie would give an audience. As Max, Aksel Hennie’s eternally boyish looks and intense acting create a warts-and-all hero who is appealingly human, while Ken Duken’s Siegfried is a far more complicated bad guy than his handsome face would suggest. (If he looks familiar, it’s because Duken was in Quentin Tarantino’s silly Resistance farce Inglorious Basterds). In an excellent supporting cast, Agnes Kittelsen plays Tikken with a beguiling directness. Despite
some nail-biting derring-do, Max Manus is at heart an artful
appreciation for the men and women who risked death by fighting
insurmountable odds.
Kevin Filipski
|
