Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” belongs to the tradition of the troubled family drama, bourgeoisie division. Money is mentioned a few times, but everyone seems to be doing okay, making livings as artists while being haunted by past tragedies.
The primary setting is a stylish home in Oslo that has belonged to a family for generations. It’s wonderfully evocative: rich in nooks and crannies, old enough to have character and young enough not to appear to be a nightmare to keep running. To quote “Wonder Boys,” the Michael Chabon novel as well as the movie that Curtis Hanson later made from it, this looks like a great place to wake up in on Christmas morning.
And yet, looking back on “Sentimental Value,” that house also seems cold. It’s attractive but almost too orderly, and cinematographer Kasper Tuxen allows a lot of sterilizing white light to flood the house’s chambers. It could be a great house for Christmas morning for people capable of experiencing the communal joys of the day. But these characters are lost. A quotation of Chekov isn’t incidental.
Movies about affluent families gripped by turmoil serve a dual purpose, offering escapes into hallowed realms that resound with glamorous versions of our problems. We can have a good cry at the universal parts while glorifying ourselves. I’ve strolled many streets lost and haunted. But I’m sure I’ve never looked as profoundly, cinematically haunted as Stellan Skarsgård does when his character wanders a beach in a black trench coat, looking for funding for a movie that he is to direct, a project that merges his longing for his lost mother with his regret over his abandonment of his daughters.
Trier is playing in a sandbox that can yield either an Ingmar Bergman movie or a disposable holiday event to see at the theaters while the family is over. At times, Trier seems to distrust his own considerable polish, an impulse I admire, as I also distrust his polish. “Sentimental Value” is smooth, wrapping a nesting variety of social and personal atrocities up in a poignant and digestible and attractive commercial movie that also at times wants to be prickly. A scene late in the game of the filmmaker’s face merging in close-up with those of his daughters suggests a joke as well as a plea, as if Trier is saying “I know I’m not making ‘Persona’ but I couldn’t help myself.”
What Bergman had that Trier doesn’t, not here at least, is a willingness to tear his elaborate labyrinth of artifice down to get at emotional chaos. “Sentimental Value” is much more restrained than, say, “Persona,” but then again Bergman also made movies like “Smiles of a Summer Night” and “Fanny and Alexander,” movies made with considerable control that suggest a roiling undertow beyond the style. That’s what Trier is going for, and he’s subtle about it. “Sentimental Value” has been ecstatically received, which means that the backlash is about due, in which critics ignore the film’s splinters and write it off as a serious-minded episode of “Frasier.” I love “Frasier,” by the way.
Skarsgård plays Gustav Borg, a filmmaker touring the festival circuit who hasn’t made a movie in many years. He returns to his childhood home, to his grown daughters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), upon the passing of their mother, his ex-wife. Gustav sounds like the classic self-absorbed, womanizing “great man” who must humble himself out of fealty to an oft-used screenwriting formula.
Yes and no. Trier and Skarsgård complicate things.
Gustav is easily the most charismatic person in the movie, in the tradition of bad dads who always steal movies out from under their aggrieved children, but his charisma is recessive. Skarsgård doesn’t sentimentalize this role, allowing you to see precisely what he’s withholding from his children. That’s commendable, but the real trick of Skarsgård’s performance is that he allows you to see that Gustav doesn’t understand the breadth of what he’s denying his children. Gustav is naturally self-absorbed, even when he thinks he’s being thoughtful, and Skarsgård shows how that absorption is a prison.
Nora is an actress, accustomed to hearing that she could do better from her father, while Agnes is a historian who is used to be quietly eclipsed in attention by father and sister alike. Reinsve has the showier, more damaged role, but it is Lilleaas who really moves me. If these women feel like common types for movies — the tortured artist and the responsible one taken for granted — those types show up quite a bit in life, too. One is determined to walk dad’s walk, even if she doesn’t know that, the other to refute it with stability, even if it’s the stable one who ironically forgives dad his trespasses.
Trier has invested his characters with contradictions that feel real and archetypal at once. At times, this movie suggests an essay on every similarly themed film to come before it, from Bergman to “Hannah and Her Sisters” to “The Royal Tenenbaums” to “A Christmas Tale” and others. At other times, “Sentimental Value” fascinatingly feels not quite digested. A meta angle, following Gustav as he attempts to cast the movie he wrote for Nora with another actress, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), seems needless, leftover from Olivier Assayas’ various cinematic games. An evocation of the Nazi occupation of Norway also feels to be almost beside the point, one tragedy too many.
Small moments linger in “Sentimental Value,” such as when Gustav watches one of his old movies at a festival, which features Agnes as a young girl. Gustav’s movie ends on a close-up of Agnes, and Gustav in the present day quietly gasps, as if he is seeing her for the first time since awakening from a fugue state. Trier knows just when to nip such a scene, allowing it to linger. There are several moments like that here, which elucidate loneliness and failure as well as the pain of not knowing how one has arrived at such a state of affairs. Even the ending, which could be misread as being less ambiguous than it actually is, resounds with unsettled emotions. Father and daughter are working together and looking one another in the eye and may not know what each sees.
“Train Dreams” may be the most precious movie that I’ve ever enjoyed. Adapted by writer-director Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, it is awash in stately and pristine compositions of nature and period décor, with narration, read by Will Patton, which emphasizes the fleetingness of all things.
It is the early 20th century in the Pacific Northwest, and Robert Grainer (Joel Edgerton) is one of God’s lonely men, a taciturn railway and timber worker whose life marks America’s evolution from a wonderland to a beacon of the new corporate age. We are in the land of Terrence Malick cosplay, in other words, in which woo-woo poetics rue the loss of innocence and a belief in the natural world to commercialism.
The movie takes some getting used to. I tend to distrust period movies with immaculate costumes and characters that always have a way of handily summing up the filmmakers’ themes. William H. Macy appears as a codger who is near the end of his rope with timber work, and of course he is not so much a codger as the codger, an only in the movies old man descended from John Ford and Howard Hawks westerns. Macy is so vivid and so underused lately that you overlook the clichés and roll with it.
A stark turn of events punctures the sentimentality, and the middle third of the movie, with Robert sleeping on the scorched earth of his former homeland in the middle of the dark forest night, is legitimately stirring. The biblical bleakness gets under your skin, as does Edgerton’s powerful, tactile performance. If Edgerton asked for the viewer’s sympathy, “Train Dreams” might collapse into camp. But he doesn’t. His Robert isn’t interested particularly in being liked or not liked, he simply is, and he weathers misery with nearly the same temperament as he does fleeting joy.
“Train Dreams” concerns the distance we keep from ourselves; how we view what we’re doing and what’s happening to us from a passive stance, as if we’re the audience for our own lives. That distance can keep us from feeling our lives, but Edgerton’s heartbreaking performance makes you feel it. He makes alienation material, earthy, tragic. The movie’s catharsis is the moment that Robert finally allows himself to join the present tense.
“Sentimental Value” is now playing at Movieland, while “Train Dreams” is streaming at Netflix starting Nov. 21.
