Louder Than Bombs
Directed by: Joachim Trier
Written by: Joachim Trier & Eskil Vogt
Starring: Gabriel Byrne, Jesse Eisenberg, Isabelle Huppert, Devin Druid, Amy Ryan, Ruby Jerins, Megan Ketch, David Strathairn, Rachel Bresnahan
Drama - 109 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 19 Apr 2016
Written by: Joachim Trier & Eskil Vogt
Starring: Gabriel Byrne, Jesse Eisenberg, Isabelle Huppert, Devin Druid, Amy Ryan, Ruby Jerins, Megan Ketch, David Strathairn, Rachel Bresnahan
Drama - 109 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 19 Apr 2016
We’ve seen movies where the rest of the family attempts to carry on after the sudden death of a loved one. Ordinary People and Imaginary Heroes pop up first in my head. Louder Than Bombs occurs a couple years after its tragedy but while the characters all pretend to move on, they remain stuck in their respective ruts of grief and uncertainty. Danish director Joachim Trier builds for us a family portrait. We follow their individual, subjective experiences where the family is the subject rather than just one of the characters setting it apart from the previous mentioned films.
Filming in English for the first time, Trier most recently studied death in another form, suicide, in 2011’s Oslo, August 31st. We learn about the death in Louder Than Bombs piecemeal. There are flashbacks which seem present and the deceased family matriarch (Isabelle Huppert, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them) walks into a room every now and then as if she were still alive. Trier employs a unique and experimental form departing from the logical chronologies audiences are familiar and comfortable with.
Filming in English for the first time, Trier most recently studied death in another form, suicide, in 2011’s Oslo, August 31st. We learn about the death in Louder Than Bombs piecemeal. There are flashbacks which seem present and the deceased family matriarch (Isabelle Huppert, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them) walks into a room every now and then as if she were still alive. Trier employs a unique and experimental form departing from the logical chronologies audiences are familiar and comfortable with.
Huppert is fascinated by her work as a wartime photographer. Trier said he needed a presence to play an iconic and passionate mother who shows little remorse or trepidation alighting from her New York suburban family to chronicle catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq. She has several lives and can’t reconcile all of them; there is a cleavage between her private and professional life and Trier helps us piece together her private, family life succumbed to her professional ambitions.
Gabriel Byrne (The 33) is the man who stays behind to finish raising their two boys. Byrne, trying to hold it all together, ruminates in a complex identity crisis. What does it mean to be a man, a father, a husband? Trier puts Byrne under a microscope and examines his reactions under extreme emotional circumstances. Is Byrne a hero for trying to keep the family going and for not sliding over the edge? We’re used to defining a hero as someone who is perfect. Byrne personifies the idea of the flawed man as a heroic man. There are no answers to what it means to be heroic in everyday life when sometimes there is little recognition of that fact.
Beyond identity and suspect heroism, Louder Than Bombs also examines memory. How do you remember? Perfectly or imperfectly? Byrne is haunted by the presence of his dead wife; that’s what he has to live with everyday. His memories of why his wife may have opted toward particular choices clash at time with the memories of his sons. Does the teenager, Conrad (Devin Druid), suffer more than others? Trier makes his pain more overt for the audience to grapple with. Conrad keeps everything inside of himself but we discover more about him throughout. He needs to let it out and sharing his private life through his online journal comforts his older brother knowing his little brother is just introspective and not planning on shooting up his school. The death hits Conrad harder than his older brother and father but he won’t show it.
Huppert cannot have a job as intense as war photographer without being affected by it. She’s a bridge to the tragic, outside world for her family, but paradoxically, she creates a tragedy in her own home. Louder Than Bombs is about the aftermath and the grief of her perhaps spur of the moment or even planned decision. Her eldest son, Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg, American Ultra), is a brand new father himself yet immediately takes a leave of absence from his wife and newborn to put right his mother’s professional work. Jonah’s actions are a bit too suspect to all be placed on the altar of grief; his sadness may be an excuse for callousness and flight from responsibility.
Trier wrote an effective New York story, a break from his Scandinavian roots, but only two legs of his family tripod, Byrne as the father and Druid as the younger son succeed in believability; Eisenberg’s situation is more nebulous to puzzle out. Louder Than Bombs takes us on the journey through unexpected places, plays around with timelines, and tests the audience on our adeptness at interpreting images. It is neither Trier’s greatest film to date nor the best examination of grief at the loss of a loved one, yet Louder Than Bombs provides plenty of weighty themes to chew on and study.
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