Denmark’s Oscar-Nominated ‘A War’ Is A Smart, Sensitive, Troubling War Movie

“In the last few years, as the wars changed shape and expanded, a strange thing happened. The culture began to focus not on ordinary soldiers, but on extraordinary ones—Navy SEALs, special forces operators, military contractors. The movies changed — Act of Valor, Lone Survivor, American Sniper. They celebrate heroes, they take place in a vacuum of political context, and they’re hugely profitable.”

That’s Christopher Hooks, giving a little context on Michael Bay’s supercharged Benghazi movie 13 Hours and bemoaning a facile approach to war pictures becoming a little too prevalent in American filmmaking for comfort. The ideal antidote to these rah-rah jingopaloozas comes to American theaters by way of Denmark in the form of A War, Tobias Lindholm’s sensitively observed new military picture/courtroom drama. While square-jawed supermen gun down waves of enemy combatants in a nauseating video-game environment, Lindholm’s troops carefully weigh each and every action before moving. The international contrast is almost funny in how faithfully it adheres to regional stereotyping; Europe’s war movies spend a minute in a firefight, and then two hours sorting through the consequences strewn about the wreckage.

Lindholm’s approach to armed conflict hews closest to the Hurt Locker school, understated but never for a moment lacking in intensity. He mastered the high-wire act of sustaining unbearable tension in a pressurized standoff with his last feature, A Hijacking, and here he puts those skills to use placing the viewer directly into the searing heat of combat. Our man is Company commander Claus M. Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk), a Dane serving in Afghanistan and an unheroic sort of hero. When circumstances push the normally peaceable soldier into a dangerous scenario requiring swift and decisive action, there are no music cues to notify the viewers that shit’s in the process of getting real. Lindholm turns up the burners with increasingly claustrophobic cinematography that practically sticks the camera in the sweat-stained helmets. Asbæk’s outstanding performance of trembling courage masking bone-deep empathy, liable to break under the strain of war at any time, is another gas jet raising the overall temperature. The audience understands where Pedersen’s coming from as he makes a call under duress that results in eight civilian deaths, which makes his agonizing guilt all the more painful. The Danish military court system, however, plans on punishing Pedersen even more than he has already punished himself, segueing into a crackling legal investigation during the film’s second half.

Not only acutely attuned to the emotional toll that wartime takes on those lives it touches, Lindholm is also aware of the ripples that expand to affect the home front. He devotes equal time to Claus’ wife Maria (Tuva Novotny) and the struggles she endures as a single mother and wife during her husband’s absence. Though never going so far as to cross-cut between the two, Lindholm directly communicates the corrosive, infectious rot that war leaves on the entirety of the nations involved. Claus and Maria’s parallel tribulations dovetail with the gripping deliberations to determine this earnest, dutiful soldier’s innocence. It’s during these standout scenes that we glimpse the Lindholm who last tagged along with Thomas Vinterberg to the Oscars in 2014 as the co-writer of Best Foreign Language Film nominee The Hunt, wherein Mads Mikkelsen played a schoolteacher accused of pedophilia. Lindholm intuitively understands how doubt and uncertainty can warp perceptions and magnify blemishes on otherwise respectable profiles, and he gives due consideration to all sides of the debate, never dismissing anyone with broad characterization or cliché.

Lindholm’s film claims responsibility as its central theme and reason for being, holding its fallible hero responsible for the reasonable choice he made as a flawed human man and holding itself responsible for depicting the ruinous effects of war that begin in the individual and then spread into the community. While stationed in Afghanistan, these Danes fight the same global war on terror as U.S. forces, and yet everything appears to them as a dark duty rather than a chance to show the bad guys who’s boss. There’s no business more serious than war, and in a war where a complete absence of battle lines or enemy uniforms means that violence can erupt anywhere and harm anyone, the slightest slip-up takes innocent human lives. In lesser war films, the victims of bombing and gunfire are extras; here, they’re essential.

A War opens in limited release on Friday before expanding.

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