Paul Greengrass (2018)

It’s no surprise that Paul Greengrass’s account of the 22 July 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway is compelling, wrenching and troubling.  The film would be all these things even if Greengrass hadn’t dramatised awful and very recent actual events before.  It’s more troubling because he has.  Once you’ve removed the three Jason Bourne movies he’s made from Greengrass’s filmography, Green Zone (2010) is the only unarguable outlier in a sequence, now spanning twenty years, which includes:  The Murder of Stephen Lawrence (1999), Bloody Sunday (2002), Omagh (2004), United 93 (2006), Captain Phillips (2013) and now 22 July.  There are differences between them (beyond the fact that some were made for television and others for cinema).  The ongoing public campaigns for justice for Stephen Lawrence and the victims of Bloody Sunday gave a political urgency to the films about them.  Although it was a protracted ordeal for those involved, the Maersk Alabama hijacking dramatised in Captain Phillips wasn’t an outrage of the same order as others in the list.  That still leaves the Real IRA attack in Omagh, 9/11 and the terrorism of Anders Behring Breivik.  You have to wonder what attracts Paul Greengrass to these subjects to the virtual exclusion of others.  If the answer is that he knows he has the technical skills to realise them convincingly on screen, that’s hardly reassuring.

The attacks on Friday 22 July comprised two stages.  Breivik detonated home-made explosives from a van parked in the government quarter of Oslo, killing eight people, before driving to the island of Utøya, twenty-odd miles away, where the annual summer camp of the Workers’ Youth League was taking place.  Posing as a police officer sent to secure the site in case of further attempted terrorism, he explained the absence of accompanying officers by telling the camp supervisors that police manpower was having to be devoted almost entirely to dealing with the consequences of the central Oslo attack[1].  Using a semi-automatic rifle and a pistol, Breivik then proceeded to execute 69 people, most of them teenagers, and injure many more.  When counter-terrorist police arrived, he surrendered without resistance.  As well as directing, Paul Greengrass wrote the screenplay for 22 July.  (His main source is the book One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway and its Aftermath by the Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad.)  The hours leading up to the attacks and the events on Utøya occupy close to an hour of the film’s total running time (143 minutes).  The remaining part focuses on three principal characters:  Breivik; Geir Lippestad, the lawyer who represented him; and Viljar Hanssen, a seventeen-year-old survivor of the Utøya massacre, who battles to overcome severe injuries and, in 22 July‘s climactic scene, gives evidence at Breivik’s trial in 2012

The first part of Greengrass’s narrative offers a predictable though gripping contrast between the murderous preparations of the weird, solitary Breivik (Anders Danielsen Lie), who was thirty-two at the time, and the youngsters on the summer camp – jolly, sociable, having fun as well as engaging in lightweight political discussion.  (The Workers’ Youth League, affiliated to the Norwegian Labour Party, actually owns Utøya.)  He stages Breivik’s rampage on the island to shocking effect but Greengrass can’t be accused of wallowing in the mayhem.  He shows, as well as the terror and panic of the teenagers, several executions.  (Perhaps the most appalling sequence of all sees Breivik urging a group of kids to take refuge in a meeting room, before opening fire on them there.)   The director, his cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth and his editor William Goldenberg don’t, however, linger on the carnage.  Sune Martin’s score is discreet throughout.  You can be engrossed and moved by this film (as I was) but at the same time feel (as I did) that it amounts to the worst of both worlds.  Greengrass gives a realistic and all too credible description of dreadful, true-life events.  He then shapes the material in a way that makes 22 July, although it’s always tough to watch, easier to bear.

As soon as Viljar Hanssen (Jonas Strand Gravli) appears on screen, he stands out.  The pleasant, open face of the young actor playing him naturally takes the camera.  It’s Viljar who is selected to give an if-I-were-prime-minister address to the Friday morning plenary session at the youth camp.  When news comes through of the explosion in Oslo, Viljar is immediately on the phone to his parents (Maria Bock and Thorbjørn Harr) to check that they’re OK.  When Breivik starts shooting on Utøya, Viljar’s first priority is to protect his very frightened younger brother Torje (Isak Bakli Aglen).  The audience is by now engaging with Viljar more than with anyone else.  As the gunman closes in on them, Viljar urges Torje to run; Breivik then fires five times on the older boy.  At this point, you assume Greengrass is using Viljar to convey at least something of the horror of what Breivik did.  Viljar can’t possibly survive five bullets:  instantly eliminating the person on the screen we’ve got to know and like best will echo, albeit only faintly, the sudden annihilation of so many young lives[2].  From the moment we see the stricken Viljar move slightly, though, we start to hope.  Hope not only that he’ll live but that Paul Greengrass will thereby rescue us from Utøya – a reconstruction of reality but still an oppressive fact – and transport us to the safety and familiarity of a movie, in which the hero fights back in the face of overwhelming odds.

This is what happens in 22 July – and Greengrass might well defend his approach on the grounds that this is what really did happen.  Viljar, in a coma for several days, sustains injuries that are serious and lasting.  An operation to remove shrapnel from his brain can go only so far:  some pieces are too deep to reach without the risk of causing brain damage.  He loses the sight of one eye.  The physical change in Jonas Strand Gravli, so vibrant in the early scenes on Utøya, is convincing and he interprets Viljar’s huge psychological struggle very well.  (His brother Torje survives physically unscathed but Viljar’s two best friends are among those murdered by Breivik.)  The difficulty in regaining bodily movement is a simple, potent expression of how hard it is for Viljar to ‘move forward’ from what’s happened.  The metal fragments that can’t be removed from inside his head are similarly powerful in both physical and symbolic terms.  Victims of violent crime or those close to them often claim that it’s they, rather than the perpetrator, who’ve been given ‘a life sentence’.  According to the film, this is literally true in Viljar’s case in the sense that he will always be at risk of the shrapnel shifting position and potentially affecting brain function.  Closing legends summarise what the principals did next or are doing now.  Today, Viljar Hanssen is at university, studying law and preparing for a career in politics.

The trouble is, I caught myself, well before the end of 22 July, looking forward to a closing legend telling me that Viljar was doing fine.  His story is often upsetting but Greengrass gives it a structure and dramatic highlights that make it cinematically conventional and, to that extent, reassuring.  The well-written, well-acted scenes that illustrate the difficulties faced by his parents in the light of Viljar’s injuries make you all the more aware that the film is steering clear of describing in any detail the aftermath of Utøya for bereaved parents.  Those whose children died are treated as a group.  We see them in discussion with prosecution lawyers (Inga Bejer Engh and Hasse Lindmo) or with Jens Stoltenberg (Ola G Furuseth), the Norwegian prime minister of the time, but the film shows them only in these public contexts.  Greengrass does give screen time to another young survivor, Lara Rashid (Seda Witt, looking older than the sixteen-year-old that Rashid actually was), whose sister has died on the island.  But Lara’s main function in the story is to be a friend and support to Viljar; she hasn’t much independence as a character.

Even within the limited focus he adopts, Greengrass is highly selective in what he’s prepared to cover.  At the time of the attacks, Viljar’s and Torje’s mother is running what proves to be a successful campaign for re-election as mayor of Svalbard, where the family lives.  The narrative gives as least as much attention to events around the re-election as to the effects of Utøya on Torje, whose emotional needs inevitably take second place to his brother’s.  Greengrass gets across economically the features of a legal system that benefit Breivik:  application of the rule of law to guarantee him a fair trial; the fact that Geir Lippestad (Jon Øigarden) is required to accept the brief to represent him in court, even though Breivik’s right-wing nationalist politics, let alone his crimes, are anathema to his liberal lawyer.   But Greengrass does little to dramatise the awful conflict between the benign-looking Lippestad’s conscience and professional obligations. 

This is one of two films to appear this year dealing with the attacks.   I’ll give the other one – Utøya: July 22 – a miss but its Norwegian director Erik Poppe has made clear in interviews that he wanted to concentrate on survivors of Utøya rather than attempt to enter the mind of Anders Breivik or cover his trial.  Greengrass’s morally questionable decision to make Breivik a main character among others beyond the point of the attacks is hardly justified by the results.  In reality, Breivik’s heavy look, the fleshy, pasty face and piggy features, reinforced the sense of self-approval he exuded in television coverage of his trial and made him even more disgusting than he would otherwise have been.  Anders Danielsen Lie doesn’t physically resemble him at all:  in the early scenes, Lie’s staring-eyed, ascetic look sharply contradicts one’s image of the real thing.

Once Breivik is in custody, Lie’s acting shows skill and integrity.  He captures Breivik’s cleverness and resists crudely villainising him.  This is another instance, though, where replicating external physical characteristics of an actual person has a weird effect if the actor’s face is very different from the original’s.  With the short dark beard that Breivik has sometimes worn in court appearances, the lean Anders Danielsen Lie has a somewhat North African look.  The language used by Breivik to justify his crimes – or, in his mind, acts of heroism – is strikingly similar to that of fundamental Islamists.  Breivik, like the jihadists, is engaged in a holy war, even if hatred of Islam is one of his motivations in waging it.  He claims to belong to a group called the Knights Templar, named for the medieval Christian military group that took part in the Holy Land Crusades.  If Greengrass is deliberately giving Breivik the appearance of a modern-day Islamist, it’s a piece of ironic nerve quite unlike any other aspect of 22 July.  The connection is more likely unintended.

22 July has come in for some adverse criticism along the lines that Netflix and an English writer-director had no business muscling in on a unique national tragedy (although the cast is Norwegian, they speak English dialogue throughout).  It’s hard to gainsay these objections, at least if they come from Norwegians.  Hard too to know if Greengrass’s outsiderness is relevant to one of the film’s more refreshing aspects.  Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg (now Secretary-General of NATO) is shown as a man with reason to agonise over and reproach himself for what happened on 22 July 2011.  Yet he’s conscientious and sensitive rather than a self-serving crook and bastard – in other words, he’s not the now standard screen politician.  (The cynical assumption that they’re-all-tarred-with-the-same-brush has a lot to answer for, contributing as it has done to the international rise to high political office of real self-serving crooks and bastards.)

Jens Stoltenberg is a minor figure in the film, though, and there’s a problem with the presentation of its dominant figure Breivik much larger than the matter of physical appearance.  While it’s widely accepted that the 22 July attacks were the work of a lone wolf terrorist, Greengrass goes too far in presenting Breivik as an isolated case.  It’s one thing to rubbish his claim that the Knights Templar are legion and to have a senior extreme right-wing activist appear briefly to disown Breivik’s terrorism.  It’s quite another to have Geir Lippestad, having discharged his professional duties and visiting Breivik in prison to sign off the paperwork, tell his ex-client that ‘our children and their children’ will ensure that Breivik’s ideas never win.  Giving testimony in court, Viljar Hanssen says he has reason to be grateful he’s now blind in his right eye:  because of where Breivik is sitting in relation to him, Viljar can’t see his attacker’s face.  It’s a grimly humorous moment that Greengrass weakens through Breivik’s reaction – a too obvious look of discomfiture.  In the later prison cell scene, the director compounds the wishful thinking of Lippestad’s parting shot by having Breivik’s face register conclusive defeat.  If only.

15 October 2018

[1]  One of the few ambiguous elements of 22 July is whether Breivik really believed at first that the Oslo explosion had disabled essential state services to a greater extent than it actually had.

[2] It may well be different for a Norwegian audience that has already heard of Viljar Hanssen, even heard him talk about his experiences.  I’m assuming only a very small proportion of the international audience for 22 July will be in that position.