Joachim Trier (2015)

Isabelle Joubert Reed (Isabelle Huppert) was an internationally renowned photojournalist, acclaimed for her images of the human suffering resulting from conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.  She got used to fielding questions from interviewers about the dangers of her work and how these conflicted with being a wife and the mother of two sons.  Her reply was that she would know when it was time to stop.  That time came in 2011; not long afterwards, Isabelle died in a car crash near her family’s New York home.  The media noted the irony of her death occurring so soon after her life had become safer.  Two years on, her fellow photographer and close friend Richard Weissman (David Strathairn) is writing a piece about Isabelle for the New York Times.  He tells her widower Gene (Gabriel Byrne) that he’s going to reveal in this piece what both men already know:  that Isabelle’s death was suicide.

This conversation between Richard and Gene is one of two starting points in Joachim Trier’s Louder Than Bombs, which the director wrote with his fellow Norwegian Eskil Vogt.  The other starting point, which supplies the film’s opening sequences, is the birth of what would have been Isabelle’s first grandchild.  In a hospital room, her elder son Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) touches the fingers of his newborn son and smiles uncertainly.  His wife Amy (Megan Ketch) asks Jonah to get her some food:  she’s starving.  It seems surprising that the hospital doesn’t feed patients and it doesn’t seem to be late at night but Jonah has to search far and wide in the hospital for provisions.  He eventually returns with a meagre offering from a vending machine but his tour of the building hasn’t been entirely wasted.  While he’s wandering round the cancer care department, he runs into his former girlfriend Erin (Rachel Brosnahan), who is visiting her terminally ill mother.   After the tearful Erin has composed herself, she asks how Jonah’s academic career is going and he tells her it’s going well, that he’s now a professor.  Erin then asks what Jonah’s doing at the hospital.  ‘My wife Amy …,’ he begins – and then pauses, long enough for Erin to misunderstand.  She infers that Amy too is dying.  When Erin expresses her sorrow at the news, Jonah doesn’t put her right.

Jonah also knows the truth about Isabelle’s car crash but his younger brother Conrad (Devin Druid), who was only twelve when she died, doesn’t.  The drama of Louder Than Bombs pivots on Conrad’s ignorance and the impact that Richard’s piece may have on him – especially since Conrad already seems mired in isolation and desolation, seems not to have come to terms with the loss of his mother.  For most of the film, Conrad speaks voluntarily to no one but Jonah, when the latter returns to the family home to sort out (belatedly) photographic material that Isabelle left behind.  Whenever Gene starts a conversation with him, Conrad angrily insults his understandably concerned father and then clams up.  Gene is a former actor turned teacher – he’s now working at the same school where his younger son is a student and he’s having an affair with Conrad’s class teacher, Hannah Brennan (Amy Ryan).  Conrad is in the dark about that too and this pale, lanky boy looks deprived of physical as well as intellectual light.  He spends a lot of his time alone in his room, on his computer.

This set-up gets the viewer asking questions and gives a foretaste of what’s to follow in the determinedly gloomy, variously incredible Louder Than Bombs.  Did Isabelle leave suicide notes for both Gene and Richard (with whom, it’s later revealed, she’d been having an on-off affair)?  If not, how do they know she meant to kill herself?  Is it just because they’re aware she was depressed after giving up her work – or did the lorry driver involved tell the police that Isabelle appeared to intend a head-on collision?  If the latter, why and how has this been kept quiet?   When Erin asks what brings Jonah to the hospital, does he falter because he’s embarrassed to tell his ex how far his life with her successor has progressed?  But since he’s already told her that he’s married, why would he then be reticent about telling Erin he’s a father?   This would be something very natural to brag about and Jonah is very evidently competitive.  It’s hard to think either that he’s so uncertain about fatherhood that he wants to keep quiet about it or that he’s considerate enough not to want to impart happy news when Erin’s just given him the bad news about her mother.  Is Jonah’s claim that he’s a professor a deception too?  The viewer shares Erin’s evident surprise at the news (‘That was quick!’) but it doesn’t seem impossible:  Jesse Eisenberg, with his hair cut shorter than usual, looks more boyishly brainy than ever.  Later on, though, in a flashback to Gene’s first meeting with Hannah, he tells her that his elder son is expecting his first child and just completing his doctoral thesis in sociology.  If Jonah made professor while still a research postgraduate that was more than quick.

The answers, such as they are, to the above questions, fall into two categories.  The circumstances of Isabelle’s death are an example of the first of these – what might be called the flatly unconvincing.  Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt can’t suggest how it can be known that she meant to die:  they’ve just stuck this idea into the script in order further to ‘darken’ the material.  The climax to the conversation on the cancer ward is an example of the second category – the fancily unconvincing, which combines pretentious metaphor and negativist cheap shot.  Jonah lets Erin think his wife is dying to make us see that he’s screwed up with unease that his marriage is dying.  Later on, Jonah calls on Erin and goes to bed with her.  During their post-coital chat, she asks if Amy’s hair has fallen out; for a few seconds, he doesn’t know what Erin’s talking about.  As I watched Louder Than Bombs in Edinburgh’s Cameo Cinema, feeling bored and irritated, I didn’t expect to write much about it but it seems in retrospect a particularly flagrant example of what I so often find vexing on the screen.  Here’s another film that depends fundamentally on the audience accepting its world as a real world, that we’re watching credible people and events.  There’s no pretext for making the people and events implausible yet considerations of realism are ignored whenever they might get in the way.  The director, in spite of jettisoning in cavalier fashion what’s believable, still expects the viewer to accept that the film is revealing truths about the human condition.

Conrad keeps imagining in his head exactly how his mother died.  He downloads from the internet disturbing, sometimes morbid, video clips and images from which Joachim Trier creates a startling, stylish montage.  Conrad never reads anything online, however – even though we soon find out that he’s interested in words and in writing.  On the day that Richard Weissman’s piece appears in the New York Times, it’s well into the evening when Conrad catches sight of the front page of the morning paper, on a drugstore newsstand, and starts reading.  He’s in the drugstore with another boy from school with whom he’s en route to a party.  This boy behaves as if he knows Conrad well, even though the latter hasn’t until now exchanged a word with any of his classmates.  He hasn’t done so because this would complicate the way the film presents him.  He doesn’t read the Weissman piece until late in the day so that he can go to the party feeling even more sad and vulnerable than he already was.  He returns from it with a girl called Melanie (Ruby Jerins) whom he fancies but hasn’t dared speak to until now, so that Trier can compose one of the most arresting and silly visual details in the film.  The inebriated Melanie relieves herself behind a car while Conrad, standing on the other side of the vehicle, averts his gaze.  Her urine trickles along the ground and under one of Conrad’s shoes.  The camera moves up to his face.  A complementary lacrimal trickle runs down it.

Louder Than Bombs features a sub-American Beauty score by Ola Fløttum and shares its title with that of a Smiths album.  The title indicates that Isabelle’s demise in the New York suburbs has had greater impact than her years in war zones although the auditory flavour of the phrase isn’t particularly apt:  Joachim Trier is more concerned with the crater of bereavement than the explosion of death.  It isn’t clear in any case how much Isabelle’s death has changed things.  Flashbacks to her in conversation with her husband and her elder son suggest that both Isabelle and Jonah always despised Gene, as Jonah still does; and no real connection is made between Jonah’s marital difficulties and his grieving for his mother.  As for Conrad, it’s simply hard to believe that Shane Ryan, who plays him as a younger child, turned into Devin Druid:  their physical differences undermine the deep spiritual changes which Trier presumably mean to convey.  It’s fortunate for him that Isabelle Huppert is by some way the most charismatic performer here:  the viewer is aware of how relatively little is seen of her – and, to that extent, partakes of the male characters’ missing her.

There’s an unfortunate and presumably unintended correspondence, though, between the Reed sons’ attitudes towards their father and Gabriel Byrne’s playing of Gene.   In his first scene with David Strathairn (who, like Amy Ryan, is wasted), Byrne’s facial movement seems excessive but he soon settles into a set expression of troubled kindliness:  you can see why Gene gets on Jonah’s and Conrad’s nerves.  At the end of the film, Gene tells Jonah, ‘It’s time for you to go back to Amy.’   The viewer accepts that he’s right but only because it’s time for the movie to end, not because anything’s been resolved.  Jonah is the worse for drink so Gene drives him home and Conrad comes too.  Jonah sleeps in the front passenger seat and Conrad at the back, still dreaming about car ‘accidents’.  Gene glances at his dormant sons and smiles fondly.  Is this moment meant to be as depressing as it is?   The unignorable implication is that the father gets on just fine with his boys for as long as they’re unconscious.

Gene and Jonah do have one thing in common.  Just as the son was far from euphoric about the birth of his and Amy’s baby, so the father is remarkably uninterested in his grandson.   When Jonah arrives at Gene’s, the latter is surprised but never regretful that he’s unaccompanied.  Even when he offers to drive Jonah back, Gene doesn’t perk up at the prospect of seeing the baby.   I doubt this uninterest means anything much.  It’s more likely another instance of lazy writing and direction – rather like the film’s erratic use of internal monologues, deployed only when they’re a convenient way of making the next point.  In one early sequence, Gene, from a distance, watches Conrad in a cemetery, as the boy prostrates himself before a headstone.  We assume it’s Isabelle’s and that the kid is grief-stricken but Conrad tells Jonah later that he couldn’t find her grave so just picked one at random, knowing that his father was anxiously spying on him and what Gene would infer.  Conrad’s assumption requires that Gene doesn’t know the location of Isabelle’s grave either but Joachim Trier wouldn’t be interested in that sort of relevant detail.  What matters to him more is that the headstone chosen by Conrad belongs to a Carlos Valdez.  It’s a(nother) nod to Vertigo.  For those who go to movies to spot references to other movies, this may make the experience of Louder Than Bombs worthwhile.

26 April 2016