In a better world

The Danish film industry chose wisely when it picked its entry for the 2011 Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar. In a Better World, directed magisterially by Susanne Bier, combines various elements from past award-winners: the juxta-positioning of European and African story lines, schoolboy alliances, bullying, marital stress and, as the original and much more informative title announced, revenge (Haevnen).

Its writer, Anders Thomas Jensen, provided the screenplay that won both the Oscar and Golden Globe for foreign film in 2011; it was his fourth collaboration with Bier. For its first hour, it was a visually stunning, emotionally gripping film tapestry, weaving its various story lines well.

Then, an over-loud over-emotive ecumenical chorale wailed, and there was one too many beautifully composed cinematographic postcard of African landscapes contrasted with similarly ravishing scenes from the Danish countryside. For the second hour, the movie's all-conquering power was lacking, its credibility sapped, every scene too craftily contrived.

The core story is that of two schoolboys, one a buck-toothed sweet-natured bullied son of a separated couple. His Swedish father is the director of a field hospital in Africa, probably Sudan, his Danish mother also a medical professional. A new boy at school, fiercely resentful of his mother's death from cancer, befriends the "rat-boy" and uses him as a means of revenge on the world and his distant businessman father.

In Africa, the doctor is obliged to provide treatment for a one-eyed warlord who (conveniently for the movie's morals) places bets on the sex of pregnant women's babies, and slices them open to find out the answer. Back in Denmark, visiting his two young sons, the doctor encounters xenophobic adult bullying from another dramatically convenient villainous character. On both continents, his high-minded decency is tested, and in Denmark he tries to teach the three boys the virtue of turning one's cheek and ignoring moronic behaviour. The alienated child prefers the idea of revenge, in words against his father and with knives and bombs against bullies.

Meanwhile, the mother unknowingly seeks some justice for her unfaithful husband, the widower cannot establish a relationship with his motherless son, and that angry boy sits often and ominously on the rooftop of a tall silo. All the characters end up happily, as they are supposed to in a better world, and the screenplay ignores the future lives of the Africans and the school bully. The movie is an above-average TV drama; moralistic soap operatics that look good and sound too pat, too formulaic to be convincing images of forgivable revenges.