Last Blog On The Left

Let´s imagine for a minute that you are pretty well respected film director and that you somehow have managed to secure a budget for your dream project: a bloody viking epic, starring one of your favorite actors, Mads Mikkelsen. What´s the next step? You would probably want to work on your script, if you hadn´t already done that, right? That would be the logical next step. Unless your name happens to be Nicolas Winding Refn. Then you´d just gather up your crew, get poor old Mads into some make up and head on out into the wilderness. Who needs a script? If you´re a talented enough filmmaker, you´ll make it work, right?

Wrong. I´m sorry to say but Nicolas Winding Refn really dropped the ball on this one. He not only dropped it, he misplaced it so bad that it is now forever lost. “Valhalla Rising” will forever be a sad chapter in this talented filmmaker´s career. You should know that I am a huge fan of his and have for years been going around and saying shit like “The only interesting filmmaker in Scandinavia today is Nicolas Winding Refn”. Well, he sure made me eat those words earlier today. I feel almost violated! I can´t for the life of me figure out what he was thinking when he made this film.

If you´re not familiar with the story, Mads Mikkelsen plays One Eye, a mute warrior who´s been held prisoner by the Norse chieftain Barde. Aided by a boy slave, One Eye manages to slay his captor and escapes along with the boy. After this they hook up with a band of Christian Vikings who´s out to conquer the holy land and start up a new Jerusalem. You know how those whacky religious Vikings can be?

Anyway, they join the Vikings on their ship but it is soon engulfed by extremely thick fog. Up until this point I hadn´t given up on the movie. You see, the opening scene is fantastic. It´s the scene you saw in the trailer with Mikkelsen beating the crap out of an opponent lying on a muddy hill. This is what his captors use him for: to fight other warriors for money or other riches. When he´s not fighting, he´s kept on a leash or locked up in a cage. Kind of like a Viking era-cage fighter. Or a Viking era “Danny the Dog”. But you remember how that movie fell apart as soon as Jet Li started to say his lines and you once again realized that he sounds like Dolly Parton about to hit puberty? Well, Winding Refn doesn´t have this problem because Mikkelsen´s character is mute. Hell, it´s almost as if every goddamn character in this movie is mute because they don´t hardly speak at all. They´re Vikings, remember? Grim, tough men who stare at each other and every now and then laugh at each other with contempt. That´s how they rolled back then. So they don´t speak. At all. For an hour and a half. It takes over ten minutes into the movie before the first line is uttered but in the opening this approach works. It kinda gives the movie a Peckinpah-like quality of “A man´s gotta do what a man´s gotta do” but by the time they get on that ship, I was pretty sick of it.

But then the fog rolls in and you know what they say: that´s when the terror begins. Except that in this case it doesn´t. Nothing begins or even happens! But then the Vikings reach land, where they are stalked by an unseen enemy in a series of silent, totally tension-free scenes. Again, nothing happens.

I may be wrong but I think there may be two Nicolas Winding Refn out there, directing movies. The first one is the guy who did the three “Pusher” films: gritty, lean, urban crime dramas with fantastic dialogue and performances. Then we have his twin brother, who seems to be suffering some sort of Kubrick-ian, Malick-ian crisis. This is the guy who directed the deliberately paced “Fear X” and “Bronson”. It is obvious that it is the second Winding Refn who also directed “Valhalla Rising”. Unfortunately. The only similarity to “Pusher” that this movie has is that the violence is quick, graphic and sudden when it occurs and Winding Refn handles these scenes expertly.

I think it´s safe to say that he´s watched Tarkovsky´s “Stalker” more than a couple of times. You remember that one? Stoic men of few words, with the pain of life imprinted in the lines on their faces, walking around in dirty clothes. That sumps up “Valhalla Rising” as well. Maybe he used that in his pitch meeting? But the thing is this: Winding Refn has taken the whole thing with deliberate pacing to a whole new level. You thought that “Stalker” was slow, imagine if Tarkovsky had directed that flick while being on a strict diet of Valium, that´s how slow “Valhalla Rising” is!

I wonder how the hell Mikkelsen got talked into this one. I can understand that he wants to work with his friend the director but he must´ve said yes to this one before he read the script. He must have. That´s the only explanation. Somewhere inside this tedious mass, there´s a decent short film of 10 minutes hidden. Unfortunately, it´s stretched out to 90 excruciating minutes! If you were to run all the scenes of Mikkelsen staring at the clouds, at normal speed instead for the extreme slow motion they are in now, this movie would be about 40 minutes long.

Now, I´m all for movies with stoic, rugged men in the lead and Mikkelsen does a decent job here but you can´t maintain interest in the character because he is given absolutely nothing to work with! Not once do you know what One Eye is thinking or feeling. Hell, even Danny the Dog had some motivation but One Eye is like a blank canvas. That says nothing. At all. But say what you will, he´s quite good at staring, that Mikkelsen fella, there´s no doubt about that.

Visually speaking, this is a great film and it´s obvious that the people behind it are very talented. Winding Refn has a great eye but that just makes this whole awful experience all the more painful: why the hell didn´t he bother to write a script that could match the epic vistas? Maybe that was a selling point in securing Mikkelsen for the gig:

- Mads, we´ve finally got funding for our Viking movie! We start shooting next week.

- But I´m on vacation, Nicolas… I don´t wanna have to learn any new lines now.

- Uh, lines? That´s right… Don´t worry, you won´t have to learn any lines because… your character´s mute! That´s it! He´s mute!

- Okay, send over the script and I´ll take a look at it.

- Uh, script? Okay, I´ll whip something together and mail it to you later today.

I actually had the pleasure of speaking to Winding Refn a couple of years ago at the Gothenburg Film Festival and he was an extremely polite man with a lot of interesting things to say so I feel kind of bad racking down on him this way but honestly, there´s no excusing this! If there ever were a missed opportunity, “Valhalla Rising” is it!

It´s only hours ago since I saw this movie but I already feel nostalgic for a time before it. Let´s hope that Winding Refn ends up in debt again, so he´s forced to make two new “Pusher” movies. Or at least is forced to write a script for the next movie he makes.

Until next time: take scare!

Thomas

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Action, Drama, Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.