OVP: Another Round (2020)

Film: Another Round (2020)

Stars: Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Lars Ranthe, Magnus Millang

Director: Thomas Vinterberg

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Director, International Feature Film-Denmark*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

I see, as you might have picked up from this blog, a lot of movies.  And this has been particularly true during the quarantine.  In 2020, it has been at least one every two days, and while I don't think I'll get to 300 films viewed this year...it won't be far from that marker.  As a result, movies will oftentimes struggle to grab my attention the way they normally would someone else.  This isn't a slam-I learn from & enjoy even bad movies, as it's a passion born out of endless love, but films rarely will genuinely surprise me past the first ten minutes, other than maybe a twist or two.  That was not the case, however, for Another Round, a movie I caught as part of a festival screening recently.  The film starts out as a midlife crisis tale, one with the clear trappings of a "social issue" movie and then...it takes some detours.

(Spoilers Ahead) We have four friends in the beginning of the film who teach at a school: Martin (Mikkelsen), Tommy (Larsen), Peter (Ranthe), & Nikolaj (Millang).  As I mentioned above, all of them are suffering through a midlife crisis-their jobs aren't fulfilling, their marriages are lacking...it just isn't working.  The four men start to discuss at a birthday dinner the teachings of Finn Skarderud (an actual real-life psychiatrist), who essentially professed that maintaining a blood alcohol level of 0.05 indefinitely would make you more relaxed & better at life.  The four men decide to do this, and initially it works-they flourish in their careers, their sex lives improve, & they feel genuinely happy.  But the substance abuse becomes a problem, as they increase their alcohol intake, and eventually it begins to wear on their lives, threatening their jobs.  One of the men, Tommy, can't quit when they decide to stop drinking (as he is now an alcoholic), and he kills himself.  The ending of the movie mixes the joy previously found (from alcohol) with the bitterness of the funeral, as the men begin to celebrate with their students their impending graduations.

The movie initially feels like a The Lost Weekend situation, with these four men, particularly lead character Martin, understanding that alcohol is not the solution to their problems, and confronting their addiction.  This is an important subject, but it's also one that has been tackled ad nauseum in the movies, and I almost groaned when I realized that was where it was headed...and was floored when instead it's more about the bizarre behavior of these drunk men.  While the ending clearly shows what they're doing is wrong (Tommy's life being the sacrifice of their experiment), it takes a strange attitude toward alcohol, essentially saying that it "has its time & place" with the men indulging at the end.  This might be the first movie I've ever seen about addiction that seems to almost condone it, but that would be too glib, since these men clearly abused it but were able to quit (unlike Tommy), and so it's more about "in moderation."  As a result, the movie has a weird vibe that I dug-I don't know how much I agree with its politics, and it might read as more problematic to someone who has had more experience with addition than I have (I have been lucky in that regard of my life), but its strange beats are what it has going for it.

I wasn't, however, a huge fan of its handling of toxic masculinity.  There is a vibe of "boys will be boys" throughout the movie, and I don't know that I wanted Martin to get back together with his wife, whom he under-appreciated & whose children he put in jeopardy with his drinking.  Watching a movie about a bunch of straight white men behaving badly, and only one of them paying any tangible consequence is not something you necessarily want to reward in 2020, even if it's well-made, and I leave still confused over whether I like Mikkelsen as an actor (I find him too subdued in every role, even one like this where it isn't called for).  That being said, Another Round is a good movie, and one that I'm excited to see in conversation for this year's Oscars if only because I want to hear more opinions about its unusual story beats.