Loud­er Than Bombs

The leap in qual­i­ty between Joachim Trier’s stel­lar direc­to­r­i­al debut Reprise and its even-more-stel­lar fol­low-up Oslo, August 31^st was, in a word, giant. Where we are with his lat­est film (and first in the Eng­lish lan­guage) is a big step to the side, and a small shuf­fle back­wards. But where those first two films land­ed swift and hard punch­es to the gut, Loud­er Than Bombs opts for death by a thou­sand small, inci­sive cuts.

Cast­ing chrono­log­i­cal sto­ry-telling aside, the film depicts a mid­dle class fam­i­ly dur­ing a peri­od of unpre­dictable grief fol­low­ing the death of matri­arch Isabelle (Isabelle Hup­pert). The act of mourn­ing is usu­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with still­ness and con­tem­pla­tion, yet this is not the case with her two sons Jon­ah (Jesse Eisen­berg) and Con­rad (David Druid). The pair grav­i­tate towards impul­sive, pos­si­bly irra­tional behaviour.

Even though he’s just become a father, Jon­ah uses a trip back at the fam­i­ly ranch to tom­cat around with ex-flames, while school-aged Con­rad takes ques­tion­able mea­sures to score with the cheer­leader of his dreams. Father Gene (Gabriel Byrne) is des­per­ate to make some kind of sense of the sit­u­a­tion. A posthu­mous gallery exhi­bi­tion of his late wife’s work as a war pho­tog­ra­ph­er cer­tain­ly isn’t mak­ing mat­ters any easier.

It’s a sce­nario that heaves with the poten­tial for slushy melo­dra­ma, but Tri­er and trusty co-writer Eskil Vogt nev­er go there. Instead they just fol­low the char­ac­ters on a mean­der­ing (and some­times inter­sect­ing) path of con­fu­sion and dis­il­lu­sion­ment. And if that all sounds like as much fun as a swift­ly-swung slip­per to the keis­ter, rest assured that it’s all pieced togeth­er with such pre­ci­sion, dis­cern­ment and dry humour that the tax­ing process of unpack­ing the film means that it sits long in the mind. Per the Smiths-ref­er­enc­ing title, the film is itself an emo­tion­al blast zone, sug­gest­ing that while the moment of the explo­sion itself may cause the most phys­i­cal pain, it’s the bloody after­math that will be felt for years to come.

The rela­tion­ship between the father and his two sons also avoids cliché́ by not weigh­ing down char­ac­ters with famil­iar roles. There’s no-one keep­ing a cool head, and there’s also no-one who’s vis­i­bly melt­ing down. Jon­ah, whose sense of matu­ri­ty is spurred on by his new­found pater­nal respon­si­bil­i­ties, ends up being crip­pled by arro­gance. He reads his dad’s sad­ness as a sign of weak­ness, and so decides to assume respon­si­bil­i­ty for the family’s pub­lic affairs – a job for which he’s woe­ful­ly under-qual­i­fied. Con­rad finds solace in online gam­ing, which for a time feels like an over­ly obvi­ous metaphor for social retreat. Though at least Tri­er and Vogt have a charm­ing punch­line stashed up their sleeve.

If, in there end, the film may leave you tinged with dis­ap­point­ment, it’s only because Tri­er had set such a high bar for him­self. Props to him for not rolling out New York, August 31^st like most would’ve want­ed him to. And props to him for refus­ing to use this oppor­tu­ni­ty to reach a wider audi­ence as a way to dumb down his ideas and his eru­dite, poet­ic mode of deliv­er­ing them. This is a hefty, thought­ful pack­age, a film to live with for a while.