Is it a drama or a comedy? Good question.
Well, it could have been both. Many comedies turn serious and many dramas turn funny – at least for a short while.
In films that get it right, the comedy and the drama compliment each other – laughs and tears live side by side. Films like “City Lights” (1931), “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) and, more recently, “Life is Beautiful” (1999) and “Philomena” (2013) each do this to great effect.
Of course, mixing the two is not easy. If the comedy is too wacky, it may undermine the credibility of the story and characters, and in doing so, render any attempt by the film to be taken seriously look ridiculous. On the flip side, if the drama is too serious, any attempt to lighten things up may come across as distasteful or just plain odd. There’s always a concern about the two clashing rather than coalescing. Then there’s the question of competency and talent and all that – filmmaking is just plain hard. Good films are a mini-miracle.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell play middle-aged American couple, Billie and Pete Stanton, who, along with their two young sons – Finn (Julian Grey) and Emerson (Ammon Jacob Ford) – head to the Austrian Alps for a vacation. High up in the mountains, staying at a fancy resort, surrounded by an endless, curving expanse of white, the Stantons are ready to take to the slopes and have a blast.
One day, that blast becomes literal when the family’s patio lunch is interrupted by an out of control “controlled” avalanche. A wall of snow hits the diners and all hell breaks loose.
Worse, just as the huge wave of snow is about to hit, Pete grabs his cell phone and takes off. This cruelly clarifying moment sets off another kind of avalanche – one that threatens to keep the Stanton family buried for the rest of their lives.
DH is a remake of a Swedish film called, “Force Majeure”, which was released back in 2014 to great acclaim. I have seen both – DH first – and the differences between the two are revealing.
So, comedy or drama? Answering that question is the key to unlocking the core problem with DH – it doesn’t know what it wants to be. So, consequently, you get a stark, painfully revealing drama augmented with a few scattershot attempts at wacka-wacka.
Take Miranda Otto’s Euro-sexpot character, Charlotte. The second she runs into Billie and Pete, she begins bombarding them with barely disguised invitations to get naked and get it on. Through an aggressively silly Austrian accent, Otto’s Charlotte not only makes it clear that she is down for whatever, but she also makes it crystal clear that she has taken a cab in from another film. She’d fit perfectly in, say, “Talladega Nights: The Ricky Bobby Story” (2006) or even, “Blades of Glory” (2007) or any of Will Ferrell’s other goofier films. Those films are hilarious and silly from start to finish. DH, however, is more Bergman than Burgundy.
As soon as I got out of the theatre, I hopped on YouTube to give the trailer a second look. Surprised by how serious the film was, I wanted to see if the studio played the old bait and switch. Turns out, they did – sort of. You see, while the tralier’s content mirrors the film’s, the trailer’s style – the music and the cutting – has a light and bouncy families-be-funny vibe. This schism is jarring and weird.
I don’t doubt a dark comedy could be spun out of this same material, but that’s not what’s attempted here. Ultimately, it’s where FM zigs and DH zags that explains how one film triumphs and the other topples.
And, you don’t have to wait long to feel the difference. FM opens with a German photographer approaching the family as they take to the slopes. Talked into photos, the German photographer goes about directing them into various poses. It’s clear that this scene is very much about representation – who are these people? Later, when the wife picks up the results – 8 1/2 x 11 glossy photos from the resort fotomat – we see her delighting in seeing a happy family. Those photos, meant to prove one thing are quickly undermined by far more convincing evidence – the father’s act of cowardice.
In DH, this photo sequence is played for laughs – a sloppy attempt at slapstick. Not a cheap chuckle to be had, the sequence plays flat and pointless. The fotomat scene is cut, as well. What we are left with is a bumbling American family at the mercy of some pushy foreigner. It goes on far too long for something that shouldn’t have gone on at all. Man, those Europeans are aggressive and we Americans are so meek!
Another revealing difference is in how the Euro-sexpot character is presented in each film. In DH, Otto, as I said earlier, is a cartoon minx on the prowl for hot, steamy sex with whomever is game. I don’t blame Otto – I assume she was directed to play the character that way. Nevertheless, plain ridiculous, she clashes with an otherwise down to earth examination of a family in crisis. Imagine “The Flintstones” (1960-1966) cutting into “Ordinary People” (1980) from time to time and you get the idea.
By contrast, in FM, the Euro-sexpot character, also named Charlotte (Karin Myrenberg), is played as an otherwise ordinary woman. Yes, she’s on a sex vacation while her hubbie is at home with the kids, but he knows and they’ve clearly come to some kind of understanding that works for both of them. It’s presented as being as ordinary as could be. Myrenberg doesn’t put on a funny accent, proposition husbands openly in front of their wives or speak endlessly about boinking. Instead, she is low key, agreeable and seemingly sane. She just has a different set of values – ho-hum.
In FM, the refusal to treat Charlotte as some sort of one dimensional, militant sex freak not only keeps the film from imploding, but also allows for a stunning and revealing, post avalanche scene, later on in the film.
Still shaken and slowly coming to terms with the implications of her husband’s cowardly act, Ebba not Billie (Lisa Loven Kongsli) aggressively interrogates Charlotte about what she sees as her immature and selfish behavior.
Cearly, Ebba is desperately trying to get Charlotte to confess that her sexually liberated ways are a threat to the health and longevity of her family. It’s a killer moment. Ebba, a mother, who feels she’s done everything the “right” way, is baffled as to why her family life is crumbling while swinger Charlotte’s remains intact. Calm and rational – even as Ebba attacks her – Charlotte finally confesses. She tells Ebba that, early on in family life, she realized that she needed an identity outside of being a wife and a mother and so she developed one. Not the kind of confession Ebba expected, but it’ll have to do.
DH’s spin on that scene plays like one of those half-baked SNL sketches that airs in the show’s last ten minutes. Stripped of its cruel and cutting irony, all it has left is Otto sputtering on about how cool it is to catch some dick on the side.
Consequently, DH’s version of the scene is neither funny nor cutting. Charlotte’s just some mindless horndog – easy to dismiss. We, the audience, and, more crucially, Billie, don’t have to take her or anything she says seriously. This is not the case in FM – Ebba’s choice to pour all of herself into her family is beginning to look questionable at best and she knows it.
On the fathers’ side of things, both DH’s Pete and FM’s Tomas are fumbling their way through an identity crisis. Pete is mourning a loss of freedom (much is made of his friend, who is close by, vacationing with a much younger fuck buddy) and the disappearance of sexual desirability and the lean and sweaty bodies of many an imagined conquest.
Too much telegraphing of Pete’s mid-life mania – he’s booked a single person’s resort instead of the family one nextdoor; he eagerly follows his friend’s wild time online – makes the key avalanche moment more about lost youth rather than anything fundamental about him as a man.
Strangely, the mid-life crisis storyline is a comforting choice for us as an audience, too. The reason – Pete’s path to the light is clear to us. Heck, his few sad attempts to shake off the chains of domesticity almost do the job all by themselves. Old, flabby and a square jaw short of studly, we know Pete is bound to fail at resurrecting his hot youth and fail he most definitely does – never any doubt.
And Tomas? He’s in a much darker hell. Failing so miserably at one of the defining traits of manhood – protector – Tomas is a ship with no hull. Worse yet, his cowardice came out of nowhere. Unlike DH, there is no telegraphing here. More accurately, instead of telegraphing Tomas’ abandonment of his family in the face of danger, there is misdirection – scenes showing Tomas as a loving father immediately precede his cowardly collapse.
With no sign of domestic regret in sight, Tomas’ fateful split second decision turns all the more troubling. Instead of suggesting a brief lapse of reason, brought on by a previously hidden desire to return to his bachelor days, FM suggests something far more devastating. This isn’t about Tomas learning to celebrate what he’s gained instead of mourning what he’s lost. This is about a permanent state of being previously hidden from everyone – including Tomas himself. And it may be completely out of his control. This is who he is as a man and no one – not he, his wife or his kids – saw it coming or can do anything about it.
All and all, the choice to lighten up a film as shattering as FM is a bit of a head scratcher. Though there are a few laughs to be had, I didn’t see the original as a comedy. Maybe I missed something here, or maybe the subject matter cuts too close to the bone. I am a man after all. Going “limp” – in a crucial moment such as this – comes close to topping the charts of my worst fears. So, naturally, I found nothing funny about Tomas’ unraveling. Any subject can be made funny – no doubt – but I found FM fairly unrelenting in its march down into the darkness of familial collapse. At least, seeing it from my broad shouldered point of view, that’s how FM’s nearly 2 hour running time played for me.
However, slipping on the shoes of the fairer sex, you can see that, despite all of its doom and gloom, FM is, ultimately, a film with plenty of hope. Pivoting from a crisis that grew out of Ebba’s and Tomas’ – and larger society’s – long held assumptions about one’s worth and its slug-like attachment to dusty gender roles, the film moves on to embrace change and renewal. Stunned by the collapse of her world, Ebba, eventually, recovers to build a new one. Some ambiguity surrounds these steps – ambiguity which DH does away with – but the direction she is heading in is clear.
By contrast, DH is not brave enough to grapple with the full force of the narrative and not funny enough to play it for laughs.
And, yes, the mix is so off that the few attempts at humour that do stand out fall flat on their face. One failed gag comes out of Pete and his sons sharing a day to themselves. Not only is it not funny but it’s cringe worthy. The lame attempt at humour undermines the credibility of the drama – balance! At the same time, it resembles a restrained take on the type of gag you might actually have seen in one of Ferrell’s crazier comedies. Go all the way or don’t go at all. Here, the filmmakers tried to split the difference. As a result, the scene comes off as more confused than coherent.
As misguided as it all is, Julia Louis-Dreyfus somehow manages to pull off a mini-miracle in what is most likely the most important scene in the movie. Deeply frustrated by her husband’s stubborn refusal to admit his cowardice, Billie loses it in front of friends and everything suddenly gets painfully awkward and painfully revealing. Louis-Dreyfus stuns in this scene. She is absolutely convincing as a wife still grappling with being abandoned in a very vulnerable moment, while also desperately trying to push her husband to come clean.
Though DH does end on a note of ambiguity – too little too late – it mostly plays it safe. Punches are repeatedly pulled and mystery is snuffed out early and often.
Tonally confused and narratively simplified, DH would like to think it’s conquering a big hill when all it’s really doing is casually gliding down the bunny slope.
