In a Better World (2010)

Content by Tony Macklin. Originally published on May 2, 2011 @ tonymacklin.net.

How does a pacifist prevail in an ugly, hostile world? How do children grow up in a world of isolation, alienation, grief, and bullying?

The Danish film In a Better World won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film dealing with such issues.

The acting and the characterization are better than the resolutions the film stumbles through.

The ideas -- e.g., a person runs out of cheeks to turn, and there should be communication between parents and children -- are not exactly the stuff of brilliance.

In a Better World is not as provocative as it might be, but then probably no Oscar if it were more provocative.

Fortunately, director Susanne Bier has a cast that finds humanity in obvious themes.

In a Better World brings two broken families together. Two 10-year-old sons from the families form a tenuous bond at school.

Elias (Markus Rygaard) is called "ratface" and "Swede." He is an outsider who is the target of bullies who continually flatten the tires of his bicycle and threaten him.

His defender -- the obviously-named Christian (William Johnk Nielsen) -- has moved to Denmark from London with his businessman father Claus (Ulrich Thomsen), after his mother died of cancer.

Christian is cool and willful. He is not going to abide the hostility of others. Christian seethes with composed grief. He enlists the vulnerable Elias.

Anton (Swedish actor Mikael Persbrandt), the pacifist father of Elias, spends much of his time as a doctor in a refugee camp in Africa. Some of his patients are women who have had fetuses cut from their wombs by a sadistic, brutal warlord (Evan Muthini), just because the warlord bets on whether the fetus is male or female.

On his trips back to Denmark, Anton stays separated from his wife Marianne (Trine Dyrholm), who isn't able to forgive him for an affair he had.

Anton teaches his son Elias not to fight when he is bullied. He himself doesn't resist the abuse of an adult bully. He says he wins by not responding.

But Christian has other ideas.

Director Bier is artful at creating a sense of dread throughout her film. But the strongest part of her film is her cast.

Persbrandt is convincing as the man of peace who has his own anxieties. The two young actors -- Nielsen and Rygaard -- relate well and have distinct personalities.

Some of the screenplay by Anders Thomas Jensen lacks subtlety. One weary sequence is an important long distance conversation between father and son breaking up in static. We've heard that static before.

Near the end, we see small African children playfully fighting each other with sticks. In an earlier scene they were thrown a soccer ball.

Sticks or a soccer ball?

Despite the simplifications of In a Better World, perhaps the world is not that easy.