In a Better World

The winner of last year's Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, In a Better World, a Danish film directed by Susanne Bier, is at its heart a look at the nature of violence, specifically when it is used as a solution to a problem. Denmark, which recently was rated as the country with the happiest population, is an interesting choice to set the film, which shows how two young boys come to see violent revenge as justified.

The film stars Mikael Persbrandt, looking perpetually tired, as a doctor who works at a clinic in the Sudan, where he witnesses many atrocities, including pregnant women who are ripped open by a particularly vicious war lord. His son back home in Denmark, Markus Rygaard, is an awkward boy who is mercilessly picked on by bullies. His mother, Trine Dyrholm, struggles to raise her children with prolonged absences by Persbrandt, and the two are legally separated.

Rygaard makes a friend in a new boy, William Jøhnk Nielsen, whose mother has recently passed away. He has moved to Denmark from London to live with his father, who struggles to comfort his son, but the boy is resolute in anger. When he sees Rygaard being picked on, he takes him up as a cause, and savagely beats the head bully. Later, while on an outing, the boys see Persbrandt roughed up by an auto mechanic. Nielsen is convinced that the only way to get even is to do something drastic.

As an American, this film might have struck me somewhat diffferently than it might a Dane. I saw a parallel to the relationship between the two perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, in that one was a prototypical psychopath and the other was a follower. Though the crime in this film is at a much lower scale, the pathology seems the same. I'm not sure if that was Bier's intention--she has made comments about how the supposed homogeneous nature of Denmark might not be all that it is cracked up to be--Persbrandt and family are Swedish, which is some sort of mark against them (as an American, I can't tell a Swede from a Dane, but it is apparently easy to in Denmark). 

The scenes in Africa, in which Persbrandt's Hippocratic Oath is tested when he is called upon to treat the warlord, are a little pat in their structure. Although I admired In a Better World greatly, there is a bit of predictability to it, as nothing about it is terribly startling, even give the violence depicted. It's a good film to kick off a philosophical discussion on whether a violent response is ever appropriate.