Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1988

The Contenders:

Tom Hanks: Big
Gene Hackman: Mississippi Burning
Max von Sydow: Pelle the Conqueror
Dustin Hoffman: Rain Man (winner)
Edward James Olmos: Stand and Deliver

Nothing Good

Film: Pelle the Conqueror (Pelle Erobreren)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

There is a moment in Pelle the Conqueror (Pelle Erobreren if you prefer) that I think will stay with me for a very long time. It’s a moment of substantial and real cruelty that is entirely believable in the characters. The film’s namesake, Pelle (Pelle Hvenegaard) has a coin which is the only money he possesses. His friend, Rud (Troels Asmussen) tells him that if Pelle will give him the coin, he will allow Pelle to whip him with a nettle bush as hard as he likes 100 times. Pelle accepts, breaks off a nettle, and beats his friend savagely, taking out all of the frustrations of the dozen years of his life on his friend’s back. It’s terrible and brutal, and very real.

Pelle the Conqueror is a misery parfait movie, a film where terrible event is piled on top of terrible event and in which nothing really good happens to anyone. The smallest happiness is repaid by brutality, and the slightest hint of breaking free of the terrible cycle that we are presented with is rewarded with horror, degradation, and suffering. This is contrasted with the truly beautiful Danish countryside, giving us the juxtaposition often seen in a film like this one—the beauty of the landscape serving as counterpoint to the vicious and ugly lives led by the people who work on it.