In the new film “The Northman,” the prettiness of the pictures—the careful lighting, the calculated reflections—undercuts the roughness, the cruelty, and the gore, tnyfrontrow writes.
Claims to authenticity can be a ploy for cadging good reviews. When filmmakers trumpet the accuracy of their work, it’s a sign that they’re straining after praise on factual matters and attempting to foreclose critique of a film’s aesthetics, its pleasure factor, or its emotional truth. In short, it’s a kind of advertising.
For all of its elaborate décor and roiling action, “The Northman” is a movie of subtraction, which is developed less by the positive attention to a story than by the elimination of what makes the story enduringly significant. It’s centered on a character named Amleth , the model for Hamlet. In Eggers’s film, he’s no Danish intellectual but a Viking prince. When the story begins, in 895 A.D.
To tell this story, which Eggers co-wrote with the Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón, the director creates a pictorial world of visions and wonders, muck and gore, to evoke the crudeness and the cruelty, the mystical tenor and animistic passion, of the Viking realm—of rural northern European medieval society over all. The cinematography conjures wetness and chill in a monochrome palette that’s interspersed with color images which are most notable for the mossy green of hilly fields.
If the bulk of research appears to have blocked off the film’s imagination, then the burden of on-set exertion has had a similar effect on the performances of its remarkable cast. The script is an unintentionally ludicrous nonlanguage—an old-fashioned-ese that burdens the actors with unspeakable lines. Dialogue is rendered in the pseudo-profound pronouncements that have become the sententious lingua franca of the hero’s quest.
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