There is a tiny scene in Anders Thomas Jensen’s latest irreverent and absurd character study, The Last Viking, that is utterly pure in regards to why I love his films and his storytelling sensibilities.
A man tells a story of how he incurred a serious face injury. As the man, with the help of his wife, tries to recount the violent and shocking event with situational colour and the details of the set-up, the person he is telling it to keeps interrupting the flow with a laser-focus on the inconsistencies the trivial details of the story, and not the shocking aspects, or rather the actual point, of the story.
It is enough to drive you nuts. That IS the point, and, with a little repetitive call-back, the scene is spun into pure comedy gold.
Operating more in the lovably-out-to-lunch Adam’s Apples register, rather than his more recent Riders of Justice or WTF gonzo insantity of Men & Chicken, Jensen has crafted a movie of lovable mental cases, where the most normal character is a former bank robber with serious anger management issues.
The Last Viking opens with an animated fairy tale of nordic warriors, who are beautiful and fierce and powerful. When the king’s son loses an arm and is handicapped compared to the rest of the tribe, he mandates that all the others also lose an arm to preserve the equality (and happiness) of the group. If nobody is considered special, then everyone should be able to be equally happy.
Operating more in the lovably-out-to-lunch Adam’s Apples register, rather than his more recent Riders of Justice or WTF gonzo insantity of Men & Chicken, Jensen has crafted a movie of lovable mental cases, where the most normal character is a former bank robber with serious anger management issues.
The Last Viking opens with an animated fairy tale of nordic warriors, who are beautiful and fierce and powerful. When the king’s son loses an arm and is handicapped compared to the rest of the tribe, he mandates that all the others also lose an arm to preserve the equality (and happiness) of the group. If nobody is considered special, then everyone should be able to be equally happy.
Taken to absurd and bloody extremes, this fable demonstrates the folly of that notion. Given what is to follow, it also puts a neat and bloody bow on the film itself.
Gathering the core of his repertory players, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Nicolas Bro, and Mads Mikkelsen, along with several others, to form another one of his ad hoc communes of weirdos, Jensen examines the kind of subjective realities we all struggle with and occasionally indulge in, within the over stimulated and individualistic me-me-me landscape of the current moment.
Gathering the core of his repertory players, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Nicolas Bro, and Mads Mikkelsen, along with several others, to form another one of his ad hoc communes of weirdos, Jensen examines the kind of subjective realities we all struggle with and occasionally indulge in, within the over stimulated and individualistic me-me-me landscape of the current moment.
Manfred is a meek, and damaged man, who copes with the world by fantasy, and extreme over-compensation. As a child, he leaned into a Viking persona, and both he and his brother were bullied for this, causing a LOT of fraternal tension. As an adult, he now thinks he is John Lennon, even as he cannot play guitar, nor afford the circular glasses that were iconic on the Beatles front-man.
If anyone, and especially his brother, tries to pop Manfred’s self-built safety-bubble, Manfred will toss himself out of a moving car, or out of a window onto a stationary car, without a second thought. Manfred also has a curious habit of stealing other people’s dogs, but that is another story altogether.
If you have grown up on seeing Mads Mikkelsen play Bond villains, wizards, cultured cannibals, Death Star geniuses and other competent super-heroes on screen, it is always a delight to see the crazy performances he leans into when he is working in Danish language films. His Manfred is a mode that is unique for an actor who is already extraordinarily versatile
Here, with a floppy-curly haircut, and scrunched body language, Manfred is a deeply broken man, whose pathologies drive the plot even as they most definitely frustrate everyone around him. He lives with his sister Freja (Bodil Jørgensen) waiting for his brother Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) to get out of prison for bank robbery.
Fifteen years prior, Anker gave Manfred the key to a safe-deposit locker where he stashed sizeable about of money buried on the property of their Mom's house. His former partner Flemming (Nicolas Bro, also against type here as a zero nonsense violent thug) did not go to prison after the robbery, and blew through all of his half of ill gotten gains while Anker rotted in a cell awaiting parole hearing, and is more than ready to pummel and torture his way through getting the other half once Anker gets around to digging it up.
Upon release, Anker shows up at the apartment where his brother and sister live, and drags an unwilling Manfred, now John, to their former family home, which is now an AirBNB for rent. Armed with shovels, John's addled psychiatrist, and a couple of other in-patients who think they are the rest of the Beatles (but also ABBA, and Henrich Himmler) it is a recipe for comic mayhem which more than delivers.
Here, with a floppy-curly haircut, and scrunched body language, Manfred is a deeply broken man, whose pathologies drive the plot even as they most definitely frustrate everyone around him. He lives with his sister Freja (Bodil Jørgensen) waiting for his brother Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) to get out of prison for bank robbery.
Fifteen years prior, Anker gave Manfred the key to a safe-deposit locker where he stashed sizeable about of money buried on the property of their Mom's house. His former partner Flemming (Nicolas Bro, also against type here as a zero nonsense violent thug) did not go to prison after the robbery, and blew through all of his half of ill gotten gains while Anker rotted in a cell awaiting parole hearing, and is more than ready to pummel and torture his way through getting the other half once Anker gets around to digging it up.
Upon release, Anker shows up at the apartment where his brother and sister live, and drags an unwilling Manfred, now John, to their former family home, which is now an AirBNB for rent. Armed with shovels, John's addled psychiatrist, and a couple of other in-patients who think they are the rest of the Beatles (but also ABBA, and Henrich Himmler) it is a recipe for comic mayhem which more than delivers.
As is usual with the writer-director, there is a healthy amount of pathos and emotion that sneaks its way into the twisted story. As the two brothers work out their baggage, both literally and figuratively, the former family home evolves into a village of idiots, and mangled pop cover songs.
As "The Beatles" don their epaulette jackets, and warm up their instruments, to prepare for a talent show in town, Anker digs holes in the woods, and throws furniture around the house in the hopes that Manfred will tell him where the money is buried. In the process, both his and Manfred’s reality slowly regress back to founding childhood traumas which took place years ago under the current roof: Abandonment issues, and other family secrets that have bound Anker, Freja and Manfred, as much as they have kept them at completely at odds with one another.
All of this provides a lot of opportunity for mixing gentle lunacy with outbursts of socially transgressive meanness, and often serious violence. Not to mention treating Dissociative Identity Disorder (aka Multiple Personality Disorder) as both a 'movie-trope' as well as a trojan horse for real emotional catharsis.
I wish I knew exactly how all involved in the film, particular Mikkelsen and Lie Kass, manage to dance along the thin line between crazy, cozy and catastrophic injury, but these guys have been doing it for a while now, and have perfected their craft. The Last Viking is one of Jensen's best films in years. The magic sauce is that everyone is crazy here, which makes everyone kind of sweetly sane, within the confines of the film's curated reality.
You have to laugh, cry, and simply marvel at how Jensen pulls this kind of comedy off, and makes it look effortless. As a bonus, we get an extreme fairy tale out of the process, and a forthcoming children's book.