Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
Wait... technically speaking, that’s two things.
Damn it, it’s only day two and I’m already messing it up. Still, these two things are related, so please don’t anyone call the internet cops on me. One is a movie, and the other is... well, not exactly a distributor... it’s more like a concept. And it’s a concept I like a lot.
If you know the name “Anders Thomas Jensen,” then I suspect you already understand the appeal of his work. He is a merciless documenter of our weakest natures, our faults, our foibles. He is a writer of prodigious talent and energy. He’s got several truly great screenplays under his belt already, and he’s sort of ground zero for an entire movement in contemporary Danish cinema.
And -- sigh – he’s younger than I am.
He started working professionally while he was still in high school, and he worked in short films for a while, winning an Academy Award for one of them. The first of his films that I saw was MIFUNE. That was 1999. The year many of the most interesting guys in film right now started breaking through. He co-wrote the film, a strong, strange, personal movie that had a dark comic voice that almost felt intrusive. It was one of the early Dogme 95 films, and that’s actually the only reason I checked it out. I was impressed, but in a year that great, it was a minor work. Promising. Interesting. Forgotten by most. It was the following year that I saw IN CHINA THEY EAT DOGS, which was (for me) a huge, major, ballbusting announcement for director Lasse Spang Olsen, star Kim Bodina, and Jensen as a writer. Ferocious. Hilarious. For all of you who inexplicably worship the miserable BOONDOCK SAINTS, check this film out to see that sort of mayhem done just right.
In 2002, he reunited with Olsen and Bodina for OLD MEN IN NEW CARS, a prequel that just as rich and funny and insane. I’m not crazy about THE KING IS ALIVE, which he worked on, and I like but don’t love OPEN HEARTS, which he wrote. WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF is a great script, and as a writer/director, he made the twisted THE GREEN BUTCHERS, a dark ride worth taking, shot through with that same sort of blistering perception of how people behave. He’s a keen observer of little details, and with ADAM’S APPLES, he’s once again the writer/director. The film was made in 2005, but just recently made it to release in the US on DVD, thanks to Film Movement.
More on that below. First, the film. ADAM’S APPLES is a riff on the Book of Job, and as such, I think it’s fiendishly clever. I am personally fascinated by the Book of Job. I think it’s one of the most disturbing things in all of literature, a pure horror story. The notion of a good and just man who has his family killed and his land scorched and his possessions destroyed simply as a test of a bored and curious God is terrifying. As existential a horror story as I can imagine. The notion of loving God with your whole heart, genuinely and with proper worship, and still somehow catching this bullet that is the result of a passing schoolyard bully taunt from the Devil? Awful. Terrifying. Job got screwed. That’s the moral of the story. Randomly screwed. The thumb of God came down on him, love rewarded with glancing malice. I think it’s potent material to use as a thematic source for a film, and Jensen rises to the challenge with his typical wit and skill. Here, he casts Ivan as his Job, played by James Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen. If your only exposure to Mikkelsen is CASINO ROYALE, in a way I envy you. Because you will get your face melted off if you rent ADAM’S APPLES by how good this guy is. This character he brings to life is a tricky tightrope act as written, and Mikkelsen throws himself into it completely. From the moment he appears onscreen, he’s communicating a lifetime of horror somehow repressed into a perpetually perky hippie priest, his pain locked tight behind a constant sunny disposition.
Put simply, he’s a freakshow. A great big twitchy freakshow, and especially when set next to the stone-faced fury of Ulrich Thomsen (particularly good in BROTHERS a few years back) as Adam, a neo-Nazi who has just been released from prison when the film begins.
I love the simplicity with which the film unfolds. You see Adam being dropped off. He’s waiting for someone to pick him up. Ivan shows up. He runs a halfway house and he’s supposed to pick Adam up. Ivan’s so perky right from the start that Adam wants to smash his face in. And does. And Ivan turns the other cheek.
That’s pretty much the film. Adam is repulsed by Ivan and his attitude. Adam is the real deal, a Hitler-loving criminal scumbag who has no intention of reforming or being corrected. Ivan runs his halfway house in a purely experimental manner, treating each person who lives there totally different. He gives each of them one task that they have to accomplish while they live there, and that one task can take six months or six weeks or really any amount of time. The point is picking something and finishing it. In Adam’s case, he notices an apple tree in the yard of the house on his way in, and he says he’ll back a pie with the apples when they’re ripe. That’s his project. Ivan loves that idea, telling Adam that his job is to take care of the tree and grow the apples until they’re ripe, and then back the pie, and that whole process is his one task.
Adam’s real task, however, is breaking Ivan. He’s determined he’s going to break this smile, this good spirit. The more he studies Ivan to figure out how to break him, the more he realizes that someone is already trying to do so: God. Ivan is cursed, a man who has had more major traumas in his life than seems possible. Ivan does nothing but good, working tirelessly (if eccentrically) to help the men in his care and his community. And he’s repaid with pain after pain after pain. And he just shakes it off. Keeps moving. Keeps positive. In an almost psychotic manner. Adam realizes that if he can take Ivan’s faith away, he’ll break him as a man, never realizing that his efforts might somehow make him a believer in a higher power.
And it’s funny. Really. Not funny like MEET-THE-SPARTANS-Gallagher-pooping-your-pants funny, so maybe this isn’t a film I’d recommend to everyone, but funny like gasp-in-horror-can’t-look-away-cringe-in-sympathetic-terror funny. Mikkelsen and Thomsen go toe-to-toe for most of the movie, and they’re both fantastic in the film. Jensen has a great eye as a director, and he creates a reality here that is heightened but completely believable.
So thanks, Film Movement, for making this one of your monthly selections, and in return, let’s talk about the way your program works. You can look at their website and get detailed information about their various rates, but the short version is they’re a DVD distributor that offers a subscription service, a DVD club of sorts. Imagine if you just paid Criterion something like $35 a month and said, “Send me everything you put out.” And because you subscribed, you got a huge discount, so every disc was actually a lot less than if you picked them out and bought them individually. Imagine if you could do that with 20th Century Fox or Paramount. That’s sort of what it’s like when a studio puts you on a reviewers list. You’re being barraged with an assortment of material, not all of which is aimed at you. But some of it definitely will be. And I’m willing to bet that at some point in the future, that’s exactly how some people will consume media... they’ll pay individual studios each month a subscription fee that will give them full access to a digital library. It’s inevitable, and it’s exciting to contemplate.
Right now, at this moment, Film Movement works on a fairly small scale. They don’t flood you with new material; it’s one title a month. You subscribe for a year or for six months or whatever, and during that time, they just send you each month’s title. The two titles they sent me were ADAM’S APPLES and DREAMS OF DUST, films 9 and 10 from last year. DREAMS OF DUST was beautiful and sad and really strong overall, but ADAM’S APPLES knocked me flat. If this programming team can deliver films of this quality month in and month out, then it totally seems worth it to me to subscribe. I wouldn’t have picked up DREAMS OF DUST on my own, but I’m truly glad I saw it... and I’m sure I would have eventually tracked down ADAM’S APPLES, but not many people would have. With a service like this, you’re asking someone to challenge you 12 times a year with things that might otherwise go unseen altogether. I like that idea a lot. And if you want to know who Film Movement uses to make the decisions... if you want to know who these particular arbiters of taste are... The website has a full list of them. Film Society of Lincoln Center, South By Southwest, Ebert’s Overlooked, AFI... this is not a shabby list of resume credits that this group is sporting.
These are people who see more movies than you can imagine each year. Movies that never ever get conventional distribution. These are people in a position to do some real good, and Film Movement seems to me like a genuine step in the right direction.
Check ‘em out. And definitely check out ADAM’S APPLES. And see if you’d be willing to hand over two hours and $15 every month to have someone introduce you to something that you might otherwise go your whole life without seeing.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
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