Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!
As I slowly make my way through the latest crop of Oscar movies, I’ve found myself struggling at times to want to pull the trigger on them. All of the ones I haven’t seen are currently streaming at this point; I could finish this in less than a week if I had a mind to, but right now, what I want to watch is going in different directions. So, while Sentimental Value (or Affeksjonsverdi in the Norwegian) has gotten mountains of acclaim, I’ve found it difficult to want to watch it. But sometimes you just have to force yourself into doing those things that you know you need to do. I’d like to knock out one of the remaining Oscar films ever week—I’d be done late June/early July, and that would absolutely be a record for me.
Anyway, Sentimental Value on its surface is one of those movies that is about making a movie, but it’s really about the relationships of the people involved. Hollywood always likes movies about movies, but this is not a movie that at all feels like it’s glamorizing the business. In fact, it does the opposite, and it takes some very obvious digs at NetFlix to the point where it will clearly never be shown on that streaming platform.
Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) is an acclaimed stage actress who has a very good career but struggles with crippling stage fright. She is also currently involved in an intense affair with Jakob (Anders Danielsen), who is both her colleague in the theater and married. As the film begins, Nora’s mother Sissel (Marianne Vassbotn Klasson) has died, bringing the family together. Nor has no issues with her academic historian sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) Or Agnes’s family—husband Even (Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud) and sone Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven, who looks like Max von Sydow reincarnated as an eight-year-old).
No, the problem is the arrival of Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), the father of Nora and Agnes and the estranged former husband of Sissel. There’s a great deal of tension between the daughters and their father, who essentially abandoned them years before. He has returned, at least on the surface attempting to reconnect with them. The reality may be not darker, but more mercenary. Gustav is an acclaimed filmmaker, but has recently fallen out of fashion. He’s written a new film, inspired at least in part by his mother Karin. Karin, we learn, fought in the resistance in World War II, was tortured by the Nazis, and eventually killed herself in the family home when Gustav was seven.
Gustav has gotten financing from NetFlix to make this film. He wants to film it in the actual family home—the place where his mother killed herself—and he wants Nora to play the part inspired by her grandmother. Nora, filled with resentment at her father who vanished and then returned at his own convenience, refuses to even read the screenplay. Enter Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), a popular American actress who Gustav recruits for the role, even if that’s only to make Nora uncomfortable enough to want to take it over.
Sentimental Value won at the latest Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Feature. It got nine total nominations, and is one of those rare movies filled with noteworthy performances. In addition to the nomination for Renate Reinsve for Best Actress, Elle Fanning, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Stellan Skarsgård were all nominated in supporting roles, and it’s hard to say they weren’t deserving. I’m generally ambivalent to Elle Fanning (and this is superficial, but I think it’s because she looks like a kewpie doll), but she’s very good here. Stellan Skarsgård is as good as he ever has been, and that’s saying something.
The real strength of Sentimental Value is that, at its heart, it is about dysfunctional people, relationships, and families. “Oh, sure,” I hear you say, “There are a lot of movies that are about that topic.” And of course there are. But it’s because at some level all of us are dysfunctional; all of our relationships have problems. All of our families are messed up and painful. What this doesn’t do is push those things to the extreme. Many movies, and not just comedies, make the characters and situations elaborate and over-the-top to enhance the drama and force us to understand what is happening. That’s not the case here. While these characters are famous people in their own world (particularly the Elle Fanning character), they are all completely human. It’s their humanity that make them worth watching. There’s an honesty here rather than artificially heightened drama, and that’s always going to be more interesting. Most of us don’t know world-famous actors or even nationally famous ones. They feel fake from our distance, but here, they are as real as any of us.
In that respect, there is something perhaps not healing here, but in that direction. If you have had difficult relationships with your family, unhealed trauma with a parent, there is much here that will make sense to you in ways that are difficult to fully express. There is a deep, lizard brain quality to the drama being unfolded in front of us, and even if we can’t say specifically why it affects us the way it does, it is undeniable that it does.
Did I enjoy Sentimental Value? It’s not really a film made to enjoy in the traditional sense. It is, though, a film that is important to see.
Why to watch Sentimental Value : For feeling like this is about people no one would really know, this is surprisingly real.
Why not to watch: I can imagine this might bring up a lot of past issues and trauma for people.
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