A War movie review & film summary (2016)

I’m being deliberately vague about the plot points of this gut-churning movie, written and directed by Tobias Lindholm, it’s because I truly believe, beyond any kind of “spoiler-alert” preemptive service-journalism second-guessing, that this is a movie best experienced more or less cold. Pedersen, beautifully portrayed by Pilou Asbæk, is a good man—a large portion of the movie’s first half crosscuts between him and his wife and kids in Denmark, and his devotion and care is almost palpable—and arguably a good soldier. But what does it actually mean to be a “good soldier?” “A War” asks this question in an understated but unambiguous way. The movie could take this ever-pertinent quote from Ernest Hemingway as its motto: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” Once Pedersen and his troops are lured, in a completely appalling way, into a brutal ambush, Pedersen takes action that ends up curtailing his tour of duty, calling him back to Denmark to answer for a war crime, weighing his own conscience against the dry dictates of a defense attorney who flatly tells him, “I’m here to create acquittals, not deal with moral or ethical questions.”

This is a movie where it’s extremely helpful to pay attention, especially during the ambush scene, because Lindholm places the viewer in a noisy, confusing predicament along with the soldiers. It’s difficult to keep track of what’s going on, let alone make an assessment of what you yourself would do in Pedersen’s place. And again, the consequences of what Pedersen DOES do are nothing less than appalling. Which side are you on? Which side is the movie on? Asbæk is such an appealing actor, and the smirks and pouts of the movie’s prosecuting magistrate Lisbeth Danning, played by Charlotte Munck, are portrayed as on the petulant side, but even here the movie maintains an even hand: her arguments are cogent, sane, humanitarian, not wrong. The quiet authority Lindholm brings to the portrayal of all the aspects of the story—the soldiering, the camaraderie, the domestic travails of Pedersen’s wife as she manages the mutating behaviors of their three young children, the bland yet imposing officiousness of the military tribunal—is exemplary, and puts me in mind of the definite but unimposing style of the Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, who deals with not entirely similar but nonetheless extremely fraught moral conundrums. “A War,” as tough to watch as it can be, is an extremely rewarding and disquieting experience. 

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