An Oscar-favored European drama excuses Hollywood’s sins.
Although it’s titled Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s film is really about domestic humiliation. That’s why the Norwegian import was given nine Academy Awad nominations — among the highest count ever for a non-English-language film. It’s up against Sinners, One Battle After Another, and Marty Supreme, three contrasting films about broken American families that are so miserable they make Sentimental Value seem, well, sentimental. Yet Sentimental Value is miserable, too. Reviewers and the Academy congratulate Trier for confirming their unhappiness about life, art, and the movies.
The barely intact Borg family of artists in Sentimental Value fascinates post–Rob Reiner Hollyweird. Patriarch Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) is a celebrated filmmaker whose daughters, actress Nora (Renate Reinsve) and former child actress now adult homemaker Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), refuse to participate in his latest production. The wealthy family is haunted by politically induced mental illness. All those Oscar nominations reward an allegory for movieland’s domestic dysfunction.
Gustav exploits that trauma, basing his new project on personal tragedy partly filmed in the family’s stately Fanny & Alexander–style mansion. This attempt to blend artifice with creative blockage captures contemporary malaise — the Borgs are so self-absorbed (Nora suffers sexual anxiety and stage fright, Agnes fears for her own son being manipulated) that they offend propriety — resembling the social faux pas by Hollywood activist-celebrities. Borg betrays his daughters through artistic (emotional) incest by replacing them with a compliant American actress played by Elle Fanning, putting convenience over family cohesion.
The surname Borg recalls Ingmar Bergman’s semi-autobiographical, family-based psychodrama Wild Strawberries. Sentimental Value is mistaken for the art-movie inquiry of cinema’s great psychological artists Bergman and Carl Dreyer. Trier even dares an ersatz Persona face-morphing sequence minus the aesthetic tension of Bergman’s connection of style to morality; instead, he favors a facile, nihilistic, twisted examination. (It’s also inferior to Olivier Assayas’s family tale Sentimental Destinies).
Trier always traffics in psychological artifice. That was his problem with The Worst Person in the World, which congratulated the self-indulgence of a Millennial career girl. (Reinsve’s pathological narcissist was praised in Obama’s annual culture-czar edict.) Here, Reinsve’s Nora elaborates on that disorder; she’s the center of the film’s well-acted panoply of disaffected types. Reinsve, Skarsgård, Lilleaas, and Fanning supply the stressed sensitivity required for Trier’s Scandinavian Kierkegaardian existential anguish. The Oscar embrace of this Bergman pastiche indicates that Millennial Hollywood doesn’t know a real earthquake from merely a shock.
What’s the sentimental value of a film that trivializes Western culture? Agnes confesses, “I rarely watch films anymore.” Since Trier’s best sequence is a clip from Gustav’s purported masterpiece that featured Agnes as a child on a train carrying her away from a sibling, Agnes’s indifferent attitude suggests a self-punishing refusal.
Trier’s notions about the intersection of filmmaking and family become suspect when Gustav gives his preteen grandson a Christmas present of two DVDs: “They will teach you about women and maternal relationships,” Gustav says. But the DVDs are Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher and Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible. Both are rotten (famously obscene), and neither is suitable viewing for children. Only a crazy coot would consider them familial holiday gifts.
It’s unclear if Trier is being dirty or ironic. His casual perversity gets in the way of the film’s hokiness, play-acting the same old dysfunction that’s become a cliché in TV melodramas. The Borg-family crisis mirrors Hollywood’s incapacity for self-examination and its refusal to admit the political recriminations and disappointments that lead to career shame and outward antagonistic projection. Morrissey’s “The Monsters of Pig Alley” bests Trier with the inquiry “Did you meet the star makers and the leg breakers? / And what difference is there between the two?”
The Borgs’ sentimental self-appraisal derives from unresolved anguish superficially linked to WWII — the discovery of the grandmother’s concentration camp records. Trier’s overrated “insight” highlights past grievance while ignoring modern political crises, whether J6 political prisoners or European censorship, that might force contemporary political consciousness to account. This historical reference lacks the rigor of Rob Tregenza’s obscure yet probing The Fishing Place, a more exacting drama about Western war guilt, set in Telemark, Norway, minus the trash appeal of Trier’s melodramatic Oscar-bait approach. Maybe Oscar voters simply like the title Sentimental Value because it lets them think they still care about principles and ethics. Not since Hollywood mistook Haneke’s sardonic mortality film L’Amour to be a love story have Hollywood bumpkins been so bamboozled.
