Susanne Bier's In a Better World, which won the Oscar this past year for Best Foreign Film (over the far superior Dogtooth), is about bullying and facing bullies head-on. It is far from a subtle film, generally clobbering you to death with parallels, symbols and important meanings of small gestures. There is no way to watch this movie and not understand exactly what Bier is trying to get you to understand. This makes for a dull viewing experience; I'd much rather watch something and have my own journey deciphering it rather than having my hand held through the narrative.
Anton is a doctor in Africa for Doctors without Borders (or some NGO just like that). He works in a very poor village where people not only suffer from typical diseases like malaria and infections, but are also being beaten and cut up by a local warlord who terrorizes them. Anton's family back in Denmark is hanging on by a thread. He and his wife are separated and about to get a divorce and their early-teen son Elias is constantly the target of classmates at school for being fat (and partly Swedish... Danish kids can be so cruel!). If you didn't understand the connection, both Anton and Elias deal with bullies in their daily lives.
Elias meets Christian, a transfer student who has been living in England for several years with his parents. His mother just died and he and his father have moved back to the family estate to regroup. Clearly Christian is emotionally affected by his mom's death, and he doesn't like that Elias is the butt of classmates' jokes. The two become friends when Christian violently defends Elias. This sets the tone of their relationship: loyalty, but at a price.
Bier might have more White European guilt than any other director working today. One of her last films, After the Wedding from 2007, was about a Danish man trying to split his life between a swank Copenhagen family and his job as an orphanage director in India. I guess it's nice that she makes movies about sad, poor people who are not as well off as Euros, but her back-and-forth style in this film and that earlier one is a bit tedious and uninspired. I'm smart enough to understand that a white doctor in Africa or India is probably seeing things that he wouldn't see back home where he's from, I don't really need him to sit around contemplating how different the worlds are.
There is a very nice moral dilemma moment when Anton has to decided if he should keep his doctor's ethics and help save the life of the warlord, which would in turn let the evil man live to hurt and kill other villagers, or if he should let him die, playing God and saving more people down the line. This is a sorta fun moral game that one can think about for hours and hours. What are the limits of ethics and morals? Is it ethical to let one man die so you can let hundreds others live? This should really be the core of the film, but it's really just a chapter in a greater story. I think this is a mistake in the script (by Anders Thomas Jensen).
Aside from the pain of seeing people starving and sick in Africa, this is not a very difficult movie. It's nicely shot and well acted, but it's directed more like an after-school special than an Oscar winner. There is nothing particularly challenging and generally the Euros live to buy Ikea another day. The Africans are basically forgotten about by the end, which is a strange twist on this holier-than-thou tale. Interesting....
Stars: 2 of 4
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