These battling great Danes definitely deserve an Academy salute...
A War (15A) Verdict: Absorbing morality tale
DANISH writer-director Tobias Lindholm is a fast-rising star, whose 2012 film A Hijacking was rather overshadowed by the following year’s similar-themed Captain Phillips, but was every bit as good. A War, a Danish-language film, is also terrific, a thought-provoking morality tale constructed out of a very modern occupational hazard for soldiers; the danger of being court-martialled for accidentally killing civilians in the heat of battle, or inflicting what has become glibly known as ‘collateral damage’. Lindholm was inspired to make it after reading an interview with a soldier who said, before his third tour of Afghanistan, that his greatest fear was not being killed, but being prosecuted.
The leading man, as in A Hijacking, is Pilou Asbaek, who is best known to British audiences from his TV roles as the spin doctor in the political drama Borgen (many episodes of which were written by Lindholm), and will appear as Euron Greyjoy in Season Six of Game of Thrones. Here he plays Claus Pedersen, the decent, accomplished and respected commander of a unit based in Helmand province, who through no fault of his own leads his men into a Taliban ambush and in trying to save them, orders them to target a building that turns out to contain women and children.
His tribulations as a soldier are woven repeatedly with the domestic hassles of his lovely wife Maria (Tuva Novotny) back home in Denmark, as she tries to raise their three children alone, and to deal with their older son, who has (another very modern euphemism) behavioural issues.
But soon Claus is reunited with his family, having been brought home to face an investigation, and in due course a trial, to determine whether he acted irresponsibly in the field.
It’s an intense and at times harrowing drama, tautly written and directed, and brilliantly acted.
It is deservedly Denmark’s entry as Best Foreign Language Film at next month’s Academy Awards, and it would be a worthy winner. But whether or not it triumphs, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Hollywood pounce, and make a starrier, English-language version of a story that has a powerful resonance in our troubled world.