Valhalla Rising
Reviewed in September 2010 / Click Here to Comment
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn. Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Maarten Stevenson, Gordon Brown, Gary Lewis, Jamie Sives, Andrew Flanagan, Gary McCormack, Alexander Morton,
Ewan Stewart, Mathew Zajac, Rony Bridges, Robert Harrison, Stewart Porter, James Ramsey, Douglas Russell, P.B. McBeath. Screenplay: Roy Jacobsen and Nicolas Winding Refn.Twitter Capsule:
Refn can be an engaging poet of the body in extremis, but his structure is inert and the deadpan hard to decipher
The grandiose Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, after
making Bronson such a busy film in design, technique, and performance, downshifts slightly into a different style for his Viking epic
Valhalla Rising. I'm tempted to call it "bombastically stripped-down," since the film makes a strenuous point of being light on dialogue and palpably cold, full of
ruggedly wind-swept spaces but also prone to fever-dream inserts of blood-red waters and silhouettes, which Refn sometimes flips on their axes just for kicks. He breaks
Valhalla into six rather arbitrary parts titled "Wrath," "Silent Warrior," "Men of God," "The Holy Land," "Hell," and "The Sacrifice," perhaps having heard from fellow countryman and
egotist Lars von Trier that thou shalt have chapter titles. I'd say, though, that Valhalla Rising really breaks down into four components. In the earliest and most
arresting one, Mads Mikkelsen's one-eyed and copiously tattooed slave is kept manacled and caged by a cadre of six or seven heavy-browed pagans, their consonants and vowels
of an unmistakably Scottish persuasion. Conversation, such as it is, returns often to how much these tribal oafs hate Christians, and failing the presence of a lion, they
seem to be training Mikkelsen to be a lion, to whom they can maybe feed some Christians later on. Regrettably, though, and chained or not, he keeps winning all of his
lethal, mauling battles with these grim polytheists, who don't seem to know how funny they sound when they deadpan such slurs as, "A travelin' man told me they eat
their own God." It's a bit like watching a beefed-up Klaus Kinski braining some burly extras while six or seven clones of Brian Cox furrow their brows in the background,
laconically passing coins to each other. Actually, Mikkelsen is too dour an actor to invoke Kinski directly. In mien and in coiffure, he's more like Toshirô Mifune at his most stone-faced,
though I'd say he indicates the script's desire for a charismatic monad more then he actually projects one. Still, Valhalla Rising presents hand-to-hand brutality in ways that are
as sculptural as they are kinetic, and induces unusual tension between the chilly stateliness of the shots and the outraging events, as when Mikkelsen slits the abdomen of an
especially reviled foe, reaches into the wound all the way to his own elbows, and yanks out a burnt-brown pile of steaming innards.
That list bit ought to teach you whether you're susceptible to the elementary vision Refn's got in his head, though as in many other respects, the long prologue of Valhalla
Rising doesn't reflect as much as we might have predicted about what the final hour is like. Splicing spectacles like the frank evisceration between over-deliberately
impassive reaction shots, the film seems to be in on some epochal, close-to-the-vest joke that it isn't confessing. No answers are forthcoming. In fact, very little at all is
forthcoming while Valhalla Rising passes through a dull visual and narrative bottleneck of introducing the one-eyed, sadistic stoic to a traveling band of
Christians, who then set sail together for what they hope will be Jerusalem, but turns out to be, I think, Nova Scotia. The trip across the water is Part Two, the arrival is
Part Three, and the impenetrable reckonings of the conclusion is the big finish. For all the outlandish character designs, though, and the sense of Refn's wanting to reprise
or reimagine far-off eras of history, Valhalla Rising feels implausible and self-regarding, as dramatically chintzy as those Jean Auel novels where a beautiful Cro
Magnon abandons her adoptive Neanderthal family and takes up with some other north-European blondes, only to make us wonder what, if anything, she's gained. Though at least
Clan of the Cave Bear connects rather juicily with its pop audience, and Auel's Ayla has the grace to invent fire, hauling vehicles, and fellatio. The errant
"discoverers" of America in Valhalla Rising don't generate anything new, or even settle too fully into their new habitat. They talk about the Holy Land without, under
Refn's lens, seeming to radiate anything like a spiritual conviction. One almost wonders if this flamboyant artist is chafing under his self-imposed asceticism, though that
isn't always the best word for Valhalla's kooky imagination. From Dreyer, another fellow Dane, to Dumont and the Dardennes, the cinema has yielded artists whose sense
of how to frame a shot or photograph a body was enough to communicate an impalpable spiritual plane, onto which they were welcomed or off of which they felt themselves rudely
brushed.
Refn never accesses this numinous potential in his images but continues to intersperse portentous, non sequitur shots of landscapes and looming faces, even repeating several
inserts over and over. These mannerisms reveal themselves not to be totemic signals of something major to come or something immanent within but suggest, ultimately, a hermetic
exercise in style, only fitfully able to enrich this mute voyage with a folkloric or an oneiric undercurrent. I thought, too, of Julián Hernández's bravely stylized
and insistently elliptical Raging Sun, Raging Sky from last year. However, where the male form is capable of ecstatic arousal, violent release,
and transportative states of consciousness in Raging Sun..., the bodies in Valhalla Rising seem limited to trudging and colliding, and even at that, they get
unexpectedly hemmed in after the pugilistic prologue. We watch some brutes sail an ocean, arrive, wander around, get shot at by some mostly-offscreen Indians, and then, having
shed most members in their party already, reach one or two or three broadly predictable reckonings. I should mention that these guys have a straw-blond kid in tow, the only
survivor of the heathenish clan who had previously held Mikkelsen captive. With gaping eyes and perpetual apprehensiveness, the boy functions like one of the sidelined women
in Aguirre, the Wrath of God, a film that Valhalla Rising rather baldly imitates, but with less consistent brio or verve. The actors occasionally grunt out some
line with absurd, Herzogian relish, swiftly cut to size. "We claim this land in His name!" one of them thunders, to which his brother-in-arms evenly counters,
"How do we do that?"
Refn seems no more sure what to do with such inscrutable pseudo-levity as he is to accumulate any momentum from his intriguing cycles of abstract visual leitmotifs, or of how
to forge an actual audience connection to the Mikkelsen character, who isn't a dangerous presence so much as a tight-lipped eccentric who every once in a while acts on a sudden,
perceived need to wipe out one of his comrades. The digital interference with the landscape photography applies a hard, irritating sheen to what might otherwise have been the
world's most peculiar landscape study, and the ritualistic finale, marrying a violent and very literal climax of events with a hypnotic, poetic rendering of the same moment,
approximates a sense of the allegorical without actually evoking any meaningful symbolic resonance. I appreciate Refn for pushing so intrepidly against the usual conventions
of rhythm, photography, subject, color, and form, and I don't mind that Valhalla Rising lacks a story so much as I question its reliance on enigmatic hints of some
grand, over-arching abstraction, when Refn seems precisely more gifted at taking punchy, textural stock of objects and bodies immediately at hand. When he achieves left-field
kitsch, I couldn't tell if he had reached the apex of some strange directorial plot or whether I had simply fallen out of good faith with an imposingly highfalutin film. At
one point, Refn offers a montage sequence that has been slowed to such an extreme I could barely decipher the actions transpiring in its tracks of the parallel montage:
these include rock-stacking, fishing by hand, and what looks like a male-male tussle or a rape in a mud pit. In any case, "comprehension" had plainly receded as the capacity
Refn most wished to awaken in his audience. Or else it had vanished from the repertoire of how I felt able to respond. What Refn prompts instead I could not presume to say,
despite a sturdy mood of topographical hypnosis with no stable object, or a perplexing sense of formal proficiency and historiographic audacity matched to lumpen actors and a
barely-there scenario. But maybe someone reading this can't believe I could misperceive Valhalla Rising so profoundly, and maybe that person is coming to cudgel me.
You can't stop what's coming, and yet at other times, despite early and potent intimations, "what's coming" never truly gets going. Grade:C+
* The first version of this review labored under the misapprehension that One Eye himself was a Christian; I suspected late in the movie that this could be an error, but
boarded the wrong train early on while listening to his early captors express their repugnance at what they think they know about Christians, intercut repeatedly with shots of Mikkelsen, in
his cage or in combat. I assumed that's why he was enslaved, but of course the movie makes more sense if this is not the case—although "more sense" is a very relative
term in the context of Valhalla Rising. I still find the allegory and, more than that, the style of the film pretty opaque, but I thank blog commenter ZPJ for clearing
up my mistake.
Conceptually, even if Refn hasn't squarely hit his target, Valhalla at least harbors ambitions to engage early history in an unusual way, which one could also claim
about its peculiar approach to faith, somewhere between the unreassuring absurdism of Herzog and the inarticulate but oddly theological bruteness of Dumont.
Aesthetically, Refn still looks like a showboater, too much his own uncritical muse, but he at least takes risks on rhythm, repetition, color, sound, and stylization. He could be a dead-end
figure or an interesting talent still waiting to crack more fully, and since I haven't seen any of his work before Bronson, I should confess the possibility that I
haven't caught him at his best. Still, he's someone to watch, and he furnishes a distinctive if frustrating experience with Valhalla, a film that bespeaks its own
failure to stand up to its obvious points of lofty comparison (I would include here, too, Malick's The New World), but also the fact that
few other artists would have made it.
