Wallander III: The Brooding Continues

Inspector Kurt Wallander might have the most annoying ringtone ever.  He would not mind changing it, but he is not a gadget guy.  His specialty is the dark recesses of the human soul.  The Swedish detective will be put through the psychological wringer again in the third season of Wallander (promo here), which premieres tomorrow night as part of the current season of PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery.

As the season opening An Event in Autumn begins, Wallander is trying to pull his act together and start a new chapter in his life.  Together with his lover Vanja and her young son, he has moved into a comfily restored farmhouse.  Yet, then the dog goes and digs up a dead body in their front bushes.  Wallander reacts rather badly when the site of his hoped for domestic tranquility becomes a crime scene.  It also brings him into conflict with the seedy former tenant, whom Wallander suspects, but cannot pin anything on.  Things really get bad when a colleague is gravely injured, partly due to Wallander’s recklessness.  As you might expect, he takes this turn of events rather badly.  However, his other active investigation starts to overlap with the case of the corpse in his yard.

Autumn is absolutely vintage Wallander, filled to the brim with his angst and self-recriminations, with everything he says making matters worse.  Though grim even Wallander’s standards, it is a pretty solid crime story.  However, Sakia Reeves’ Vanja gets a bit tiresome.  After all, what does she expect from Kurt Wallander?

The clear high point of season three comes with the middle episode, The Dogs of Riga (airing 9/16).  Now shockingly living on his own, Wallander meets an even more miserable copper when Major Karlis Liepa of the Latvian police comes to inspect the bodies of some Russian gangsters that washed up on shore.  It turns out the victims were his confidential informers and members of his own force were probably responsible for their murders.  When the world weary Major also meets an untimely end, Wallander is sent to assist the Latvian police.  It is hard to tell the cops apart from the gangsters, but they are all hassling Liepa’s widow Kristina, looking for his case notes.

While the Baltics are still pretty Nordic, both in terms of climate and temperament, the change of scenery does Wallander the series and character good.  It gives director Esther Campbell an opportunity to stage some respectable cat-and-mouse games and Branagh quickly develops some nice chemistry with Rebekah Staton’s unmerry widow.  There is also an intriguing plot point involving the old archives of the Soviet-era secret police that adds some historical perspective.  It also features one of the overall series’ best guest-star performances from Søren Malling as the soon to be late Major.

Unfortunately, Riga is followed by Before the Frost, a series low point that thoroughly reflects Wallander author Henning Mankell’s strident leftism.  A childhood friend of Wallander’s semi-estranged daughter comes looking for help, but he inadvertently pushes her away with his clumsy interpersonal skills.  He will soon be desperate to find her, fearing the worst about the Christian doomsday cult she has fallen in with.  It is pretty clear Mankell considers Sweden’s biggest problem to be a surfeit of Christianity and anyone believing in Creationism is a potential terrorist waiting to snap.  Frankly, Frost is so didactic, it gets rather silly (and distracting).  For fans though, at least it reveals a bit more of Wallander’s backstory.

Despite ending on a comparatively flat note, season three of Wallander represents a rebound from the somewhat disappointing second season.  Branagh so thoroughly plums the depths of the detective’s depression, one fears for his own mental health when each season wraps.  The tense and cinematic Dogs of Riga gets the highest recommendation, but An Event in Autumn is also worth seeing, as a particularly representative day at the office for Wallander, when season three kicks off this Sunday (9/9) on most PBS outlets nationwide.

Wallander: the Revenge—the Detective Mellowed with Age

Ystad police inspector Kurt Wallander just turned sixty-two—and they were a hard 62.  Though still not exactly a people person, the detective is relatively at peace with himself now and even has close friends on the force to get hammered with.  Inconveniently, a series of spectacular crimes will soon interrupt their revelry in Wallander: The Revenge (series trailer here), the first episode of the second season of the Swedish television adaptation of Henning Mankell’s bestselling crime series, which opens theatrically in New York this Friday (with the entire second season already available on VOD).

Wallander is good at his job, but he is not a counter-terrorism expert.  Unfortunately, when the sub-station powering Ystad is destroying by a sophisticated set of explosives, it appears he has such a situation on his hands.  To make matters worse, the gallery owner hosting a controversial exhibit of Muhammad portraits is viciously murdered under the cover of the resulting darkness.  Is the assassination related to the terrorism attack?  The national authorities assume so, but investigating will be difficult until power is restored to the Malmö exurb.  The rash of exploding cars does not help either.

Given the big picture themes of terrorism and multicultural tension, Revenge, competently helmed by Charlotte Brändström, is reasonable cinematic for series television (clocking in at ninety minutes, much like most installments of Masterpiece Mystery).  In fact, it also premiered in Swedish cinemas before the second season subsequently bowed on TV.  However, as a whodunit, it is not particularly baffling.  Viewers are clearly primed for resolution absolving all suspicious terrorist types in favor of a more politically correct villain.  Indeed, Revenge largely delivers accordingly.  (However, the precise culpability for each crime is ultimately rather vaguely defined—a bit of a shortcoming for a straightforward procedural.)

Wallander will be familiar to many American mystery fans from Kenneth Branagh’s Emmy winning turn as the agonizing detective on the PBS-BBC English language series.  Actually one of three Swedish actors to play the part, Krister Henriksson is decidedly jowlier and less angst-ridden than Branagh.  Over time, that probably makes him a more welcome home viewing staple.  Nonetheless, he has some genre-fan pleasing moments of prickly intensity in Revenge.

American Swedish mystery enthusiasts will also enjoy seeing Lena Endre, recognizable as Michael Nyqvist’s co-editor and on-and-off lover in the Dragon Tattoo franchise, appearing here as Wallander’s potential romantic interest, state prosecutor Katarina Ahlsell.  In Revenge, they show the promising stirrings of some smart, mature chemistry.

It is fun to watch Henriksson’s Wallander go about his police business, when not walking his beloved dog or growling at his inter-agency colleagues.  However, Revenge’s is a wee bit polemical, at the expense of the story’s credibility.  Still, the character is an established international warhorse, so it is sort of reassuring to see him return in a more contented frame of mind.  For Wallander/Mankell diehards, it opens this Friday (6/1) in New York at the Cinema Village and is available with the rest of the second season of Wallander on VOD and DVD.

The Agonizing Detective: Wallander Season II

Kurt Wallander is the anti-Dirty Harry. He can have an existential crisis filling out paperwork. The highly intuitive Ystad police detective has cracked many disturbing cases, but it has taken an emotional toll on him. Returning to his first role for television, Kenneth Branagh cranks the psychological turmoil up another notch in Wallander season two, beginning this Sunday on PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery.

Angst is definitely Wallander’s schtick, but it frankly somewhat misplaced in the second season. The divorced Wallander’s relationship with his daughter Linda is already strained. Watching his father slowly succumb to Alzheimer’s has only exacerbated tensions. Unfortunately, Wallander is about to poison his work environment as well in Faceless Killers, which kicks off season two.

Responding to a call, he finds an elderly couple savagely tortured in their country home. With her dying breath, the wife tries to tell Wallander something that starts with “fo.” Whatever it might be, it can’t possibly be “foreigner,” the copper insists. Naturally, his less enlightened colleagues think this might be a legitimate area of inquiry, as does the local hate group, to Wallander’s exponentially mounting regret. However, Richard Cottan’s adaptation of the Henning Mankell novel takes a bit of an ironic turn, somewhat undercutting Wallander’s political correctness.

Always a fragile psyche, Wallander is a complete basket case as The Man Who Smiled opens. While pursuing his quarry in Faceless, he killed in the line of duty. Of course, Wallander is taking this rather badly, despite the fact the perp “needed killing,” as any Texas lawman would tell him. Further compounding his guilt, an old friend turns up dead shortly after Wallander rebuffs his request for his investigative assistance. Unfortunately, the villain is a rather obvious Hollywood cliché, made all the more transparent by the lack of competing suspects. Still, Smiled features a memorable guest turn from the under-appreciated Vincent Regan (AMC’s The Prisoner and Invasion: Earth) as Anders Ekman, a disgraced former policeman seeking redemption—a very Wallanderesque subplot.

The Fifth Woman is the best and final installment of season two. Wallander now has legitimate reason to be depressed. He also faces a mounting body count, as a possible serial killer dispatches apparently unrelated victims in a spectacularly slow and painful fashion. More a procedural than a mystery, director Aisling Walsh keeps the pace brisk, despite the especially painful nature of Wallander’s family drama. Indeed, it concludes the second season with a high note, on par with the first season.

In a departure from his showier roles in the past, Branagh expresses more with silence than bombast as the baggy-eyed, neurotic title character. Still, there are plenty of opportunities for him to cut loose and rage. Ultimately though, he seems to have a strong fix on Wallander’s wounded humanity. It is a good character, definitely still worth spending time with, particularly in the nearly feature film quality Fifth.

Like the Swedish television counterpart, Branagh’s Wallander comes to the BBC and PBS via Yellow Bird, the production company also behind the Lisbeth Salander Millennium films. Indeed, they are quality productions, capitalizing on Sweden’s austere landscapes, with Emily Barker’s BAFTA award winning theme song “Nostalgia” setting to the moody vibe right from the opening titles. Though season two might fall a bit short of the initial series, it remains one of the more distinctive shows on television. The second season of Wallander starts tomorrow night on PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery, continuing through October 17th.

Credit: Courtesy of ©Left Bank Pictures/ Yellow Bird for MASTERPIECE