Charlie Countryman: Next Time, Budapest

A grieving man-child is in for a heavy dose of fear and loathing in Bucharest.  It should have been fear and loathing in Budapest, or so everyone tells him as part of the film’s running refrain.  Viewers will wish they were there too, since the Hungarian city has nothing to do with Fredrik Bond’s ambitious but disappointing Charlie Countryman (trailer here), which opens Friday in New York.

When Countryman’s comatose mother is taken off life support, he does not handle the rush of reality well, but her ghost (or his mental projection) forgives him.  As therapy or to broaden his narrow horizons, she makes him promise to visit Bucharest before going on her spirit way.  You might think he would develop a complex when the old fellow sitting next to him on the flight also shuffles off the mortal coil and gives Countryman a few ghostly parting words.  However, when Countryman meets Victor Ibanescu’s daughter Gabi in the airport, he does his best to comfort her with his dopey presence.

As a professional cellist, Gabi Ibanescu is way out of his league, but Countryman falls for her hard.  Further complicating matters, her ex is the sociopathic gangster, Nigel.  It seems Victor had some incriminating evidence he had used to keep the Euro crime boss at bay.  With the stakes and MacGuffin clearly identified, Countryman and his youth hostel cronies proceed to get really high and run afoul a mobbed-up strip club.  At least it advances the plot.

Shia LaBeouf seems to have a knack for getting Alec Baldwin’s goat, so hats off to him.  In fact, he deserves credit for taking on such an unlikable character and following through on it.  Unfortunately, he cannot single-handedly rescue this weird mishmash. Nonetheless, he is completely convincing as the whiny and immature Countryman.

On the other hand, Evan Rachel Wood as a Romanian femme fatale?  Not so much.  Mads Mikkelsen does his thing as Nigel, but we have seen this shtick before.  Probably the most colorfully assured turn comes from an actual Romanian, well regarded actor and former Minister of Culture Ion Caramitru as the ill-fated Ibanescu. Bizarrely, quite a few big names are completely wasted here, including Aubrey Plaza in a thankless walk-on cameo as Countryman’s fed-up ex-girlfriend.

Frankly, the real star of Countryman is cinematographer Roman Vasyanov, whose neon noir look is seductively ominous.  In contrast, Matt Drake’s more-holes-than-Swiss-cheese screenplay does not do anyone any favors, particular the talking dead people motif.  Whether intended as magical realism or psychological expressionism, it comes off as a clumsy affectation.  There are some wonderfully evocative shots of Bucharest by night, but the vivid sense of place is not enough to recommended Countryman.  Never really coming together, Charlie Countryman opens this Friday (11/15) in New York at the AMC Empire.

A Royal Affair: Denmark’s Oscar Contender

King Christian VII of Denmark was reportedly Voltaire’s favorite monarch.  However, his revolutionary reforms were actually the brainchild of Dr. Johann Friedrich Struensee.  His mysterious advisor also assumed Christian’s kingly duties with the Queen, leaving all three vulnerable to the nobility whose interests they threatened.  Based on historical fact, Nikolaj Arcel dramatizes Denmark’s most famous and influential case of adultery in A Royal Affair (trailer here), his country’s official best foreign language Academy Award submission, which opens this Friday in New York.

The mentally unsound King Christian VII was a terrible husband.  Sleeping with everyone but his wife, Queen Caroline Mathilda (the sister of the other mad king, England’s George III), Christian’s dissipated lifestyle took a toll on his health.  To the alarm of many, Dr. Struensee earned the King’s confidence by somewhat restoring his vitality.  A not so secret enlightenment pamphleteer, Struensee shrewdly parlays his influence with the king into de facto governing authority.  For years, the Enlightenment had been slow in reaching Denmark, but suddenly it had leapfrogged the rest of Europe.

Of course, not everyone is happy with Denmark’s nouveau intellectual cool.  The King’s mother and the rest of the nobility are distinctly unamused.  Unfortunately, they will have a major weakness to exploit when the Queen and Struensee embark on a reckless affair.  Initially, she is rather put off by the doctor, but his passion and forceful personality soon look quite attractive compared to the genetic mistake she married.

Poor Christian.  He is a rather sad figure, but Arcel is clearly most intrigued by the infamous Oldenburg’s role in history.  Indeed, he has his moments in Affair.  Nonetheless, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard’s ticky man-child performance makes it easy to understand how the Queen could take up with Struensee, despite the obvious risks.

Mads Mikkelsen duly brings the haughty intensity his fans will expect.  As Struensee, he is clearly cruising for a Shakespearean fall, and even seems to recognize it deep down.  The weak link of the love triangle is definitely Alicia Vikander, whose Queen Caroline is a bit vanilla, even by Scandinavian standards.

The historical facts of the Struensee Affair are rather incredible, but the on-screen drama feels rather safe in a prestige picture sort of way.  The Enlightenment vs. Old Europe angle helps distinguish it somewhat, but even those not well schooled in Danish history will have a good idea where it is headed.  Still, it is quite a richly crafted period piece, capturing all the pomp of the royal court and the grime and depredation endured by everyone else.  Beyond the best foreign language Oscar stakes, costume designer Manon Rasmussen and production designer Niels Sejer’s team deserve some consideration during awards season. 

Ultimately, A Royal Affair is a perfectly respectable historical, but a bit of a cold fish emotionally.  Recommended for those who enjoy costume dramas, it opens this Friday (11/9) in New York at the Paris Theatre uptown and the reopened Landmark Sunshine downtown.

Norse Allegory: Valhalla Rising

Consider him the original cage fighter. It is around 1000 AD and the Christians are coming, but a band of Norsemen will enjoy their Pagan ways while they can. That includes forcing their slaves to fight to the death in Nicolas Winding Refn’s moody Viking film Valhalla Rising (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

Known only as “One Eye” (for obvious reasons) a hulking Norse killing machine lives shackled inside a crude cage far up in the isolated Highlands. He is only let out only to compete in death matches. It is said no man can own the mute One Eye longer than five years. Maybe there really is a curse attached to him, or perhaps it is just gives the lethal savage more time to figure how to kill his masters. Regardless, his current owner resolves to keep him past the five year mark. In retrospect, this was probably a mistake.

After a grisly escape abetted by Are, the young boy who brought One Eye his occasional gruel, the newly liberated slaves fall in with a band of Christians off the join the Crusades. However, when their boat sails into a preternatural mist, the already portentous film veers into some truly murky allegorical waters.

Despite the ample supply of severed heads, Valhalla is not really a hack-and-slash movie. It is more like a buffet of Pagan and Christian symbolism churned through a Jodorowsky film. Indeed, lest we forget how significant it all is, we are periodically reminded by Refn’s loaded chapter titles (“Men of God,” “Hell,” “The Sacrifice,” etc.). Yet, the film’s metaphysical implications are a bit obscure, despite Refn’s agonizingly deliberate pacing, often holding scenes so long they almost become frozen tableaux. Still, cinematographer Morton Søborg dramatically captures the harsh beauty of the mountainous landscape with striking vistas that suggest the ephemeral smallness of man, except for One Eye of course.

Even those who have found Mads Mikkelsen a bit of a cold fish in previous films (like Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky) will have to admit he is all kinds of awesome as One Eye. Beyond convincing, he burns up the screen with raw Nordic seething. Frankly, he is pretty darn scary here.

Valhalla is a strange film that seems destined to find an audience in midnight screenings. Its apocalyptic themes and medieval macho-ness make an unlikely cocktail, but there is no denying Valhalla is the work of a visionary director (albeit one with a heavy hand). He truly immerses viewers in One Eye’s brutish world, giving them a tactile sense of the cold, damp, Godless Highlands. (Why one would want to go there, is another question entirely.) It opens tomorrow (7/16) in New York at the IFC Center.