This is a best picture race full of ambitious ideas and big swings. A Trump-baiting sanctuary city saga. A continent-crossing Jewish picaresque fantasy. A Brazilian B-movie-tinged paranoid period thriller. A loopy alien-invasion conspiracy headtrip. A giant, roaring motorsport epic. Monsters. Vampires. Railroad-building. Shakespeare. And, erm, a drama about an actor’s daddy issues.
But if Sentimental Value seems to you the least essential of this years’s nominees, then, well, you don’t know Sentimental Value. From that familiar-sounding subject matter, the film’s Danish-Norwegian co-writer and director, Joachim Trier, has crafted something grand and sprawling: a family saga spiralling across decades and generations, spliced with a movie about moviemaking. It’s a film that churns and roils emotionally like Bergman, but – as with Trier’s last one, The Worst Person in the World – tears into heavy themes with a springiness, even a playfulness. And no other Oscar nominee provides such a showcase for performance, with four meaty parts for its terrific leads – all also Oscar-nominated – to chomp on.
Renate Reinsve – who is starting to build an actor-director relationship for the ages with Trier – plays Nora, a not-unsuccessful Norwegian stage and TV actress who nevertheless suffers from wild, paralysing stage fright (something she tries to combat in a very funny early scene by asking Jakob, the married theatre worker she is having an affair with, to either sleep with her or give her a slap). The stage fright likely has something to do with the entirely broken relationship Nora has with Gustav, a swaggering though faded director and absent, alcoholic father, played with bearish charm by Stellan Skarsgård.
Nora’s sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas – a real find), an academic and one-time child star of one of Gustav’s most celebrated films, is marginally less resentful of their father, outwardly at least. Still, neither sibling is entirely pleased to see Gustav bounding into their family home at their mother’s wake. He arrives with a proposition: he wants Nora to star in his likely final, career-capping film, as a character based on his own Norwegian resistance movement mother, who took her own life when he was young. It’s a proposition Nora flatly refuses but no bother: Hollywood starlet Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) is interested in the part, and with her comes the crucial Netflix funding Gustav requires. Oh, and he plans to film the bulk of it in said family home, which thanks to some unfortunate small print in the will and much to Nora’s frustration, he still owns.
You can see why the home would inspire such devotion. A magnificent wood-panelled townhouse clad in a slightly menacing mahogany and rust, it first appeared in Trier’s 2011 film Oslo, August 31st, and you get the sense that it has lingered with him ever since. It serves as the one show-stopping special effect in a film that lacks the budget of an F1 or One Battle After Another, as Trier shows it moving through history – from Nazi occupation via raging sixties parties to Nora’s difficult childhood – while standing proudly unchanging. (It is kind of heartbreaking when, late in the film, we see its handsome kitchen undergo a dull, McMansion renovation.) The large crack down its side, we’re told, was the result of a structural error at construction, but it also points to some deep familial fissure baked into the home’s very foundations. It is a place filled both with warmth and pain.
It is this complex mix of emotions that Gustav, for all that his production might seem a final vanity project, is reckoning with, as he tries to understand the truth behind his mother’s suicide. But at what cost for his own daughters? Should everything be copy, or are there limits to drawing art from painful personal history? The film takes pleasure in teasing out these questions, not to mention aiming some digs at Netflix and the general industry queasiness around anything with more depth than a puddle.
“Hollywood has stopped making movies for adults, with a few exceptions,” the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough told the Guardian in a piece on the rise of Oscar rival the European Film Awards. “That leaves room for the Europeans, who only make films for adults.” Sentimental Value is leading the charge in that regard: a European film largely not in English that has nevertheless earned as many nominations from the Academy as Marty Supreme and Frankenstein. It might not have the high concepts, whizzes and bangs of some of the other nominees, but in its place it offers something raw, real and satisfyingly grownup.
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