Few filmmakers are as attuned as Joachim Trier to the inner lives of young people. In superb movies like Reprise, Oslo, August 31st and The Worst Person in the World, he has probed the artistic dreams and frustrated desires of characters trying, and often failing, to figure out who they are. Trier's thoughtfulness is apparent even in his more middling films, like the Jesse Eisenberg drama Louder Than Bombs and the supernatural thriller Thelma, both of which were keyed into the profound ways our families can mess us up.
Complicated parent-child relationships are also at the heart of Sentimental Value, a new drama that many have hailed as Trier's best movie to date. But I've seen the film twice now, and although it's thoughtfully crafted and well acted, it strikes me as one of Trier's lesser efforts — the kind of lofty, self-consciously mature work that often gets more praise than its richer, livelier predecessors.
Renate Reinsve, the radiant star of The Worst Person in the World, here plays Nora, an accomplished stage actor whose mother has recently died. As she grieves with her younger sister, Agnes, wonderfully played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Nora must deal with the return of their long-estranged father, Gustav, played by Stellan Skarsgård. Gustav, a film director of some note, abandoned the family when the girls were still young. Now, years later, he surprises Nora by presenting her with a new script and asking her to play the lead role.
Nora turns him down, and so Gustav casts a Hollywood star, Rachel Kemp, played by Elle Fanning. (Gustav's movie is being financed by Netflix, which allows Trier to introduce some delectable film-industry satire.) Rachel is game and loves Gustav's work, but she's clearly ill at ease with the material — partly because she isn't Norwegian, and partly because the character seems based on Gustav's mother, who died tragically when he was just a boy.
In various scenes, Trier directs us to pay attention to his actors' shifting expressions and silences, all the pointed things they leave unsaid. When Nora has an unexplained attack of stage fright on the opening night of her play, we wonder if it's rooted in a certain ambivalence about acting — a profession that connects her to her father, whether she likes it or not. Agnes and Gustav get along better, possibly because she starred in one of his films when she was a young girl — a brief bonding experience that her sister never had.
Gustav, it seems, is the kind of father who can only parent through a camera lens. It's bittersweet that he treats Rachel with a paternal warmth that he seldom shows his own daughters. In the uniformly strong cast, I liked Fanning the best. Her character has a bracing and very American directness that cuts through all the wry Nordic reserve.
Trier clearly respects the audience's intelligence, which earns our respect in return. But for every sensitive, perceptive moment in Sentimental Value, there's another that feels coy, even complacent. Trier and his regular co-writer, Eskil Vogt, seem strangely incurious about their characters' art; I wanted to see more of Nora's acting, and to hear more of Gustav's script. In lieu of this, the movie floats a lot of whispery notions about how art and life converge. Even when artists turn out to be lousy parents, it suggests, art itself can be a vessel for reconciliation and healing. This idea is not exactly the stuff of revelation, and the movie basically rubber-stamps it without developing or dramatizing it anew.
A big part of the story involves the beloved family house where Nora and Agnes grew up, and which Gustav wants to use as the shooting location for his new film. We're meant to see that our homes become repositories of memory, filled with the ghosts of generations past. But there's something a little precious about these themes, just as there's something pat and predictable about the way the drama resolves. In building toward a redemptive ending, Sentimental Value lets everyone off the hook too easily, especially Gustav. You can't blame Skarsgård, who plays the role with his typically irresistible, irascible charm. But it's hard not to feel that Trier, in indulging this character, is favoring the priorities of art over the tougher questions of life.
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