Alcohol as a crutch for a broken leg

One of the best movies of 2020 is “Another Round” by Thomas Vinterberg. Its Danish title is “Druk” which translates as “binge drinking” and seems more to the point.

A tender and at times beautiful meditation on the ways people use alcohol and the ways in which individual chemistries interact with the drug, it never opened in Arkansas theatrically.

Now you can rent or buy the film through the usual streaming services — Amazon Prime, iTunes, Google Play, etc. — and if you’re a fan of foreign cinema I highly recommend it. It’s making a lot of critics’ year-end lists and has been selected as the Danish entry for Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards.

Its star, Mads Mikkelsen, is familiar to American audiences, having played a Bond villain in 2006’s “Casino Royale” and Hannibal Lecter in the television series “Hannibal.”

That aside, “Another Round” is an intriguing dark comedy — which means that a lot of people won’t perceive it as a comedy at all. Others might be unnerved by the final 10 minutes, which are surreal and upbeat and possibly shocking to those who assume movies must be moralistic. Still, it gets to something that those of us who drink intuitively understand.

It’s about four teachers at a “gymnasium” — secondary education aimed at university prep for students 16 years and older — in a suburb of Copenhagen. All of them are grappling with unmotivated students and the creeping malaise that Walker Percy designated “everyday-ism.”

Mikkelsen plays Martin, a history teacher who, as the film opens, seems deeply depressed. He’s alienated from his wife and teenage sons, and his students are so uninspired by his lessons that they arrange an intervention with their parents. As they are facing tests that will determine what universities they’ll get into, they need him to teach better, to get them more excited about their lessons.

Martin understands. He has been in a slump for a decade or more, ever since he had to forego the research fellowship he’d won, in order to raise his family.

At the 40th birthday for a colleague, one of them raises the theory of Danish psychologist Finn Skårderund, who has asserted that human beings need to be a little bit tipsy — with a blood alcohol level

Mads Mikkelsen plays a history teacher who experiments with drinking to improve his performance in the classroom in Thomas Vinterberg’s “Another Round.” (Special to the Democrat-Gazette/Samuel Goldwyn Films)