Loud­er Than Bombs – first look review

Secrets and sins are not melo­dra­mat­ic heart-stop­pers in the films of Joachim Tri­er. Instead, these clan­des­tine mem­o­ries live inside char­ac­ters for long peri­ods of time, slow­ly expand­ing like tumours until the body begins to rebel against the mind. By the time we meet these con­flict­ed souls they are almost ready to burst from the pres­sure. Exter­nal­is­ing demons doesn’t offer a hap­py end­ing, but it does ensure sur­vival and growth. To Tri­er this means the world, the option to die anoth­er day on your own terms.

Trier’s superb 2011 Un Cer­tain Regard entry Oslo, August 31^st dis­played these ten­den­cies with the utmost com­pas­sion and patience, telling the dif­fi­cult sto­ry of a recov­er­ing drug addict who ven­tures into the Nor­we­gian city for a promis­ing job inter­view. The film deft­ly show­cas­es his abil­i­ty to nav­i­gate prick­ly emo­tion­al ter­rain while also explor­ing what it gen­uine­ly means to be a good, young, and con­fused per­son in a world that doesn’t always care about any of these traits.

With Loud­er Than Bombs, Tri­er con­tin­ues his obses­sion with con­flict­ed young peo­ple, enter­ing the elite of Cannes Com­pe­ti­tion and mak­ing his Eng­lish-lan­guage debut at the same time. Set in upstate New York, the film pays close atten­tion to the small, frail threads hold­ing a mid­dle class fam­i­ly togeth­er after the death of their matri­arch, a famed war pho­tog­ra­ph­er named Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert).

Jon­ah (Jessie Eisen­berg), a smart young aca­d­e­m­ic, has just wit­nessed the birth of his first child. His fin­ger fills the frame, embraced by the small hand of his new­born son. This image estab­lish­es a sort of prim­i­tive con­nec­tion from the start. Yet Loud­er Than Bombs skews away from sen­ti­men­tal­is­ing par­ent­hood once the details of this family’s prob­lems begin to emerge. Jonah’s teenage broth­er Con­rad (Devin Druid) lives at home with their father, Gene (Gabriel Byrne). Things are not going well. Both are suf­fer­ing silent­ly and inca­pable of find­ing com­mon ground.

While this all may sound like a chilly ren­di­tion of Amer­i­can Beau­ty, Tri­er skips over the kind of social issue grand­stand­ing that usu­al­ly marks such fare. At one point Jon­ah asks the brood­ing Con­rad, ​“You aren’t going to shoot up a school are you?” The angry young man looks at his broth­er almost insult­ed by the insin­u­a­tion of vio­lence. The film sub­verts our expec­ta­tions for calami­ty in this way; inti­mate dis­ap­point­ments and betray­als are Trier’s stock in trade, and he sly­ly exam­ines the con­se­quences of fail­ing to recog­nise one’s own culpability.

As with his Oslo, August 31, addic­tion plays a role in Loud­er Than Bombs. It’s sug­gest­ed dur­ing a superb scene between Gene and one of Isabelle’s col­leagues (played with effi­cient pow­er by David Strathairn) that she was a junkie, equal­ly tor­ment­ed by the fix­es of life at home and pro­fes­sion­al fear. But it’s dis­hon­esty between fam­i­ly mem­bers that wor­ries Tri­er the most. Con­rad doesn’t trust his father for var­i­ous rea­sons, and Jon­ah makes some self­ish deci­sions with an ex-girl­friend while vis­it­ing home.

Caus­ing this over­all rot in faith is the idea that a fam­i­ly goes side­ways when thrust out of bal­ance, be it caused by a death or any num­ber of oth­er dis­tur­bances in rhythm. The film sub­tly plays with the deci­sions each char­ac­ter makes to deflect respon­si­bil­i­ty at that moment when har­mo­ny is sim­ply an act of humil­i­ty away. Tri­er address­es this mosa­ic of con­tra­dic­tions with­in a very human sto­ry about two broth­ers try­ing to reestab­lish a rela­tion­ship, and a father who can’t under­stand how the unsus­pect­ing ways par­ent­ing must con­form to the cur­rent state of things.

Loud­er Than Bombs doesn’t share the raw and ambigu­ous resolve of Oslo; not many films do. But it does prove that Tri­er is a film­mak­er pas­sion­ate­ly attuned to the types of long-ges­tat­ing con­flicts of mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion and doubt that most stu­dio pic­tures often sen­sa­tion­alise for no good rea­son oth­er than to sell tick­ets. Here, a whis­per or a touch car­ries all the weight we need to feel some­thing profound.