LOUDER THAN BOMBS
The Orchard
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten, Shockya
Grade: B
Director:  Joachim Trier
Written by: Joachim Trier, Eskil Vogt
Cast:  Gabriel Byrne, Isabelle Huppert, Amy Ryan, Jesse Eisenberg, Devin Druid
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 3/15/16
Opens: April 8, 2016

There’s a reason that people go to family comedies like “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” the romantic comedy with the largest box office ever for the genre.  Joel Zwick’s movie, with a sequel that opened March 25, deals with a working class, single Greek-American girl in her thirties who is attracted to an upper-middle class man she spots in her family’s restaurant.  Her parents want her to go to Greece to find a husband and are horrified when she tells them she wants to marry a man who has no Greek in him.  But the class conflict, the parental dissonance, it’s all played for laughs and everyone goes home happy having known all along that the joyful wedding will take place.

Films like “Louder Than Bombs” look at families in a more serious, and shall we say authentic way?  Most people don’t live happily ever after in family dramas, and the chance to find this happiness anyway and to raise a family with all the attendant problems is OK with most of us.  We gamble on family life though one wonders whether you could avoid all the melodrama if you simply stayed single for life.  Joachim Trier lets us eavesdrop on a family with serious concerns, experimenting with a non-linear plot to show the separate ways that each of the four members of the Reed family sees the situation.  With a plot co-written with Eskil Vogt, Trier uses narratives and poetic readings emerging from a high-school class wherein a student imaginatively sees himself in the story.

“Louder Than Bombs” can be frustrating in its heaviness, occasionally using poetic dialogue in a mostly naturalistic piece of theater, but in the end an audience can respect its authentic nature, especially given the superb performances all around including one by newcomer Devin Druid—who is really the principal character.

Joachim Trier, whose “Oslo, August 31st” deals with a troubled man battling drug addiction and whose “Reprise” concerns a writer who becomes an overnight sensation but winds up in a psychiatric institution, focuses here on a family virtually buried in lies, miscommunication, and tragedy.  Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert), a celebrated war photographer with an exhibit of Middle East pictures, has died in an auto accident believed by a New York Times reporter to be a suicide.  Her husband, Gene Reed (Gabriel Byrne), hides information about the cause of death from his son Conrad (Devin Druid), who is the kind of sullen teen that would convince many people to remain childless.  He broods, he does not talk to his father, he buries himself in his room with his computer games, and in one startling scene spits at his English teacher, Hannah (Amy Ryan).  Conrad’s older brother Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) would seem a healthier sort, a married man whose wife Erin (Rachel Brosnahan) has just given birth.  Yet Jonah begins an affair with an old flame at the very time that his wife is in the hospital, lying to Erin in stating that his wife has cancer.

It’s not entirely clear why both sons resent their father. After all, he means well, and thanks in part to his wife’s income has provided the young men with a fine home in Nyack, New York, yet he is overwhelmed with just this teen son to such an extent that he probably can deal more readily with one hundred fifty students each day at the high school than with his one charge.

Among the many lies on exhibit is a conversation between the two brothers, the elder telling Conrad that he’s a cool boy, probably cooler than any of the girls who are doing gymnastics on school grounds, and yet advises he should not make http://www.shockya.com/news/wp-admin/post.php?post=158931&action=edit#a play for any of the young women because they would simply laugh at him.   In another scene reminiscent of “The Hurt Locker,” in which Jeremy Renner’s character operates to defuse bombs, comes home, and cannot wait to go back to the war zone, Isabelle is bored with life in Westchester and is eager to return to the fearsome dangers in the Mid-East.

It’s hard to say whether Isabelle’s death led to her teen son’s extreme introversion and hostility to his father.  One suspects that Conrad is going through the agonies of adolescence anyway.  But such complex questions point to the skill of director Trier and to the stellar work of the ensemble with whom he is gifted in a film that many in the audience may find touches base with their own lives.

Rated R.  109 minutes.  © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online

Story – B
Acting – A-
Technical – B+
Overall – B