A WAR (Krigen)
Magnolia Pictures
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten for Shockya, d-based on Rotten Tomatoes
Grade: A-
Director: Tobias Lindholm
Written by: Tobias Lindholm
Cast: Pilou, Asbæk, Tuva Novotny, Dar Salim, Søren Malling, Charlotte Monck, Dulfi Al-Jabouri
Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 2/4/16
Opens: February 12, 2016
Donald Trump has said quite a few things that annoy the dwindling numbers of American people with the brains to understand politics and to cut through the B.S. of the campaigns. Trump’s most infuriating comment was that he does not admire people who are captured in war. “I prefer people who are not captured.” This was in relation to an American hero, John McCain, imprisoned for years in a Vietnamese cage, a man who refused freedom offered to him until all the men in the prison were released. And did I mention that Donald Trump never served in the armed forces?
As for how this relates to a narrative film about Danish soldiers fighting in the coalition again the Afghan Taliban: one commander of a unit of some twenty soldiers, Claus Michael Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk) finds himself on trial back in his native Denmark for ordering the destruction of a civilian compound which he thought was populated with the Taliban enemy. While he is ably defended, his prosecutor is a woman who reminds me of Trump, though she is barely approaching middle age, has presumably never been on a battlefield, has probably enjoyed a sheltered, middle-class life in or around Copenhagen, and who has the chutzpah to try to jail one of her country’s heroes for up to four years. This in itself should put the audience on the side of Claus, who may have violated the Geneva Convention, which declares a soldier who knowingly or without due care shoots up civilians, but whose thoughts are foremost not on international law but on caring for his buddies on the battlefield.
The opening half of the film is ably directed and written by Tobias Lindholm, whose equally tense previous work, “A Hijacking,” deals with negotiations to free Danish hostages captured by Somali pirates. Lindholm alternates between the Afghan war zone and Claus’s home where the commander has a wife, Maria Pedersen (Tuva Novotny), who along with their three small children eagerly awaits his return. The battle scenes are appropriately gory. The trial that fills much of the remainder is riveting.
The facts are these: Claus Pedersen, a thirty-something leader of a small unit, is undergoing heavy fire, trying to save the life of a man who has tripped an improved explosive device, or I.E.D., planted on the roadside by the Taliban. He is called upon frequently to make decisions, principally one involving an Afghan civilian whose daughter, suffering from burns on her arm, is helped by the Danish troops. The civilian, asking that he be housed in the Danish compound, argues that if he is returned to his home he will be killed, since he accepted aid from the Danes. But the law is the law, and Claus forces the man out. Soon thereafter, Claus orders an attack on a hut despite his knowing that the Taliban frequently surround themselves with children under the assumption that soldiers from the Western world would not try to shoot them for fear of killing kids. Nonetheless, it is discovered that the unit has killed eleven civilian children, shown in bloody pictures during his later trial.
He is sent home to be defended by a lawyer who claims that he is not an ethicist but concerned only with gaining acquittals. He argues that Claus should testify that he received the necessary authorization to fire upon the home. Claus, though feeling guilty about what he had done, ultimately agrees with the strong support of his wife to lie. Others in his unit are called in during the Copenhagen trial to testify whether or not their commander received the needed authorization.
Only three professional actors are involved in the film: Pilou Asbæk as Claus, Dar Salim as second-in-command Najib, and Dulfi AlJaburi as Lasse, a soldier. Others are played by professional soldiers who had been in Afghanistan. The ensemble acquit themselves ably enough, evoking the needed tension in the movie audience, and the trial, which can summon up images of “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial” in which a lieutenant is accused of reliving a captain of his command aboard a ship during a typhoon. One can doubt that anyone in the movie audience favors a guilty verdict despite Claus’s possible evasion of the law, though as the director states in an interview, Lindholm is not concerned with judging anyone—simply of showing what it’s like to be on a battlefield where men may be hit and dying at any time, and the duty of his buddies is to save their lives at all costs.
With this in mind, it might be difficult to go along with the leftists in America who attacked soldiers returning from Vietnam, heckling them with “how many kids did you kill today?” all uttered by mostly young people doing their best to avoid the draft and without the maturity to know what our people in uniform must undergo in an Indochinese hell. “A War” is a tightly-wound, gripping story that evokes the pressures that these men feel and the solid bonds of attachments to their buddies. Few films have done a better job of examining the notion that there is often a difficulty between the law and justice.
“Krigen,” its original Danish title, is a finalist for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and has been shot in Copenhagen, Almeria, Spain, and Konya Turkey.
Rated R. 115 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – A-
Acting – B+
Technical – A-
Overall – A-
