Violence is a poisoned three- layer cake that no one can stop sampling in the Danish film “In a Better World,” which won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar this year.
Director Susanne Bier’s chilly morality play is slow to get started, but once established, its three parallel stories comment provocatively on one another.
A boy (William Johnk Nielsen), whose ironic first name is Christian, is internally short-circuited by the death of his mother from cancer. Moving to a new place with his father, Claus (Ulrich Thomsen), he quickly sizes up the bully in school, who has been terrorizing a weak boy, Elias (Markus Rygaard), who becomes Christian’s friend. Christian answers the bully’s taunts with far more innovative cruelty and can’t understand why the rest of the world doesn’t function on such brisk moral arithmetic.
Elias’ father, Anton (Mikael Persbrandt), on the other hand, is a professional saint, a surgeon who freely offers his services in Africa, which he regularly visits in order to run a field hospital that treats all comers with equal care and mercy. Anton, ever gentle, mildly reproves the boys for responding to the school bully. The dad thinks it wiser to turn your back, a principle he illustrates when, at a playground, he finds himself getting slapped by an angry mechanic whose boy has gotten in a squabble with Anton’s other, smaller son.
Anton goes so far as to bring all three boys to the mechanic’s place of business for a chat. This, too, makes Anton look to the children like a feckless groveler whose spinelessness is an invitation to attack.
Anton, though, has far more experience with violence than the lads suspect, and back in Africa he is dealing with a world-class bully: a thug who cuts unborn babies out of pregnant mothers’ bellies for sport.
The film pulls its punches in a pat final act, yet it breaks out of the cycle of cycle-of-violence movies, with their dreary sermonizing, plot contrivances and solemn clichés about how violence is never the answer.
Denmark is not synonymous with fury, but violence in “In a Better World” is intriguingly and properly intertwined with questions of justice in our world and beyond. The injustice of losing his mother provides Christian with an understandable rage, and it may be just that a man who amuses himself by destroying fetuses must face a cruel reckoning of his own. Old Testament or New? “In a Better World” hedges its bets.