norway

Max Manus (Directors: Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg): Here is a Norwegian film about a hero of that country’s World War 2 res­ist­ance move­ment that is as slick and pol­ished as any Hollywood block­buster. Unfortunately, it also has all the brains of a typ­ical Hollywood block­buster. Not sur­pris­ingly, this film has broken box office records in Norway, becoming the highest-grossing domestic film there since 1975. I think the real Max Manus deserved better.

As the film begins, Max Manus (Aksel Hennie) is an uneducated but pat­ri­otic young man who volun­teers to help the Finns repel an inva­sion from Stalin’s Russia in 1940. After being wounded in that con­flict, he returns home to find Norway occu­pied by the Nazis, and the King and his gov­ern­ment in exile in Britain. Gathering a group of young men around him determ­ined to resist the occu­pa­tion, they begin pub­lishing leaf­lets denoun­cing the Germans and their col­lab­or­ators. After being ambushed in his second-storey apart­ment by the author­ities, he jumps out the window and falls to the street injured. While in hos­pital being treated for his injuries, he is able to get mes­sages out to his friends, and soon escapes in spec­tac­ular fashion. After this, he is hustled out of the country even­tu­ally making his way to Scotland, where he joins the Norwegian Independent Company. Further training in sab­otage tech­niques follow, and in 1943 he para­chutes back into Norway with a small team of saboteurs. From then on, he determ­ines to do as much damage to the occupying forces as pos­sible, and he suc­ceeds in des­troying numerous German boats and ships in Oslo har­bour, including a huge trans­port ship called the Donau in 1945.

By all accounts, Manus was a brave and resourceful man, and is a national hero in Norway. After the war, he wrote two auto­bi­o­graph­ical books detailing his very real exploits. Why, then, does Max Manus
feel so arti­fi­cial? Succumbing to the usual pit­falls of the biopic, the film hur­ries through all the major events in his war­time career, a period of five years. In that time, Max fought both the Russians and the Germans, formed a strong bond with his group, espe­cially his best friend Gregers Gram, and fell in love with Tikken Lindebrække, who would later become his wife. The script sketches all of these things in, but fails to colour them in with details which would add emo­tional and his­tor­ical depth. The film seems primarily con­cerned with showing the spec­tacle of Manus’ acts of sab­otage, and here it mostly suc­ceeds. Two set pieces involving the mining of ships in the har­bour are well-directed, although it’s telling that there is a curious lack of pre­par­a­tion shown in the film.

Despite that, the char­ac­ters are all badly under­written, even Max who, des­pite a good per­form­ance from Aksel Hennie, still seems too arti­fi­cially heroic and one-dimensional to be a real person. His reck­less mach­ismo as his friends are cap­tured and killed seems false, and his romance with Tikken is hardly written at all. It’s hard to say who the film­makers are trying to reach with this film. Norwegians would likely know some of the out­lines of Max Manus’ life, so a more focussed film which zeroed in on, for instance, the destruc­tion of the Donau would have been far more inter­esting. But I sus­pect the film­makers were trying to reach an inter­na­tional audi­ence and so felt they needed to cover a lot more ground. Unfortunately, they’ve cre­ated nothing more than a shallow, melo­dra­matic and rather con­ven­tional war movie that bor­ders on hagi­o­graphy. I think that’s the worst kind of self-sabotage, and some­thing a truly inter­esting char­acter like Max Manus doesn’t deserve.

We’re noti­fied in an end title that after the war, Max Manus estab­lished a suc­cessful office supply com­pany, and the bathos of that detail alone punc­tures much of the myth­making of the pre­vious two hours.

Max Manus opens in Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax on April 2nd.

Official site of the film

(6/10)

Tagged as: nazis, norway, worldwar2, ww2

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