Sarah 31, Death Race 25; 14 of 24 categories completed

The press materials for In A Better World include a statement from director Susanne Bier, in which she asserts that the film “sets out to explore the limitations we encounter in trying to control our society as well as our personal lives. It asks whether our own ‘advanced’ culture is the model for a better world, or whether the same disarray found in lawlessness is lurking beneath the surface of our civilization.”

Yes and no. I saw the movie exploring power: how it behaves, how people behave under it and with it. I saw the movie drawing — or wondering about — parallels between the dynamics of the African refugee camp in which Anton (Mikael Persbrandt) volunteers as a physician, and the school at which his son Elias (Markus Rygaard, painfully awkward but clearly on the road to foxhood in a few years) is bullied; between teenage bullies and grown ones; between African warlords and garden-variety assholes. I saw it considering whether a given relationship, be it friendship or romance, is in fact more of an alliance, rooted in the promise of protection.

Bier lets us draw most of the parallels and connections on our own, and doesn’t make them too exact or even. The script observes the laws of middle school sharply, including the way parents always seem to forget what bullying is like and the limited choices available for responding; as Christian (William Johnk Nielsen), Elias’s new friend and/or defender, snorts at his father after backing the school’s ranking bully down with a knife, “All schools are like that. No one will dare touch me now.” And the acting is fantastic across the board, particularly Nielsen, who keeps the audience guessing as to whether Christian, a fan of first-person-shooter games who’s grieving the death of his mother, is on the edge or over it.

It’s thanks to the performances that my notes included agonized scribbles like “ohhhhh God no no no” and “WTF, Anton,” because sometimes Bier can’t resist a pointed composition, like the little twister crossing the landscape after an incident at the refugee camp, or Anton stalking down a pier at the family’s summer house, whipping his shirt off and plunging into the water. The first three quarters of the story have a subtle tautness, but by the end, thanks to creeping didacticism and a mushy concluding monologue that Nielsen acts the hell out of but can’t quite put over, it’s lost that narrative muscle tone. A few cuts here and there, a Post-It in the editing bay reading “show, don’t teach,” and it’s a solid A. As shown: solid B.

I haven’t seen everything in the category yet, so I can’t predict how this will do — it did win the Globe, but I don’t know how well a Globe win forecasts an Oscar in this particular category. If it does beat Biutiful, I can live with it; I would vote for Biutiful or Dogtooth ahead of it, myself, but it’s an ambitious storytelling effort that realizes most of its goals, and it does a few surprising things without resorting to shtick.

On a side note, it’s thanks to seeing In A Better World that I happened to get into a fascinating conversation with a Starbucks manager about the rate at which bad tens get passed in midtown locations. Well, fascinating to a scrip geek like myself, but I didn’t know counterfeiters even bothered with the Hamiltons, much less that so many of them turned up at 55th and 3rd. You learn something new every day.

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