The best movies out there twiddle with something you don't see coming and then, just when you buy that thought, they come right at you like the typhoon who wants to wreck your life apart. Thomas Vinterberg's too clever a man to make that so easy for you, you know. Because he's the shady guy behind the movie about shady guys, and which is perhaps the best movie I've seen in a long, long time. The best part of it is that I didn't even know that until it ended. The Danish-language drama The Hunt is in contention for the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film this year, and I don't know any other movie I've seen lately that's meriting of the prestige. Because for a little over two hours, Vinterberg made sure I wasn't likely to forget the stakes, and he made a movie like the agony a dog feels when he's stuck in the poky wheels of a kid's bike, a movie that howls and howls and yet feels so quiet, so smothered.
To aid that beguiling brute of a movie is Mads Mikkelsen, whom you might remember as the suave antagonist who poisoned Bond and broke his balls (probably not in the way Joe Pesci and the wise guys meant it in Goodfellas) in Casino Royale. I never knew much about Mikkelsen's acting chops, because he's never really had a role he could bite into. He's been playing the urbane bad guy for the Western audiences for too long now and finally he's been fed a role that's intricate in its construction and a cinch in its portrayal. And Mikkelsen hands in a towering performance that the Academy will be too foolhardy to ignore, that that terrific script is worthy of. The best acting piece of the year? Yes, yes, yes. Don't buy it? Don't buy it. Screw yourself.
Believe you me, I'll be goddamned if you find me a better script in the recent spew of films that uses its characters so well. Mikkelsen plays Lucas, a divorced dweeb who's living a rather insipid life. He isn't getting much done except walk his best friend's daughter to school and back everyday. He's the kind of guy you empathize with in a jiffy. And Vinterberg touts that thought for the rest of the movie in a manner so nifty that's bound to provoke you, to terrify you and to unsettle you.
Lucas has a job at a local kindergarten. He capers with the kids for most of the day, initiates a romance with his co-worker. Hell, he even has his teenage son back in contact with him. So far, so good for ol' Lucas. Then comes the guillotine.
One day, right out of the blue, he's accused of being a pedophile. There. No one wants to tell him why. He wants to ask questions but no one wants to answer them. He's looked upon as a rapacious soul, even by those who would've sworn that he was anything like that. Soon enough, the whole town's believing it. There begins his ordeal.
Don't you let the strikingly simple plot deceive you. It's all peekaboo until the second half of the movie kicks in and you begin to fathom how the movie's going to turn out. Spoiler! Spoiler! : You actually don't, haha! It's unpredictable, it's hellish and it needs to be watched, mulled over, analyzed. Why? Because it doesn't give you the luxury of choice. That's not negotiable, no, no. It's a supremely well-told tale of how a man's life is torn apart by an innocent lie and how that one lie becomes the truth when it travels from whisper to whisper, from mind to mind. Try looking away.
Vinterberg keeps it brief. He doesn't want to ask questions, he doesn't give you any answers. What he does instead is suck you hard into the life he builds for his protagonist and see things from his perspective. He wants you to observe, that's it. That's all he does. He doesn't hesitate to sporadically pull cuffs and take shots at morality and social injustice, at us as human beings. That's a pretty ballsy brouhaha, eh? The script he has jotted down with Tobias Lindholm is a piece of writing of rare craft. Intuitive, observant, unflinching and sympathetic, it doesn't shy away from being candid in the truest sense of the word, even if it means slipping on the sloppy marsh into the sharp pebbles to deliver the impact it envisages. It gives us an affable protagonist and an abhorrent little antagonist but you can't fault either of 'em for the babel. That's how I figured out how good it really is. You will, too.
If I don't see the thousands of Academy heads nodding in one unified, swift motion when the Best Actor nominations pool in, I'd say Mikkelsen was robbed. He's so good, in fact, that the rest of the cast ought to not exist at all. He'll do the work alone. But, yeah, it's a terrific ensemble that captures the wrath that unfolds with just their eyes doing most of the talking. Rare, rare.
The Hunt is a great movie, an intelligent film that has depth and honesty in handfuls. It's also intrepid and gritty but in a quiet way, capturing the emotional turmoil on celluloid like no other movie this year. It leaves you a lot wiser, a little more aware.
Stupendous article. Wonderful. Just wonderful!
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