A "big" movie from Scandinavia. Not big like the kind of broadaxe Viking epic the title might suggest, but big in the way of a brick-sized 19th-century novel, big in number of screen minutes, big in ambition, big in size and number of themes explored: the strengthened bond between father and son when the wife and mother has been eliminated; the humiliating alienation of the immigrant; the inescapable pit of poverty and ignorance; the corruptingness of power; the strangeness of the entire adult world through the eyes of a child. All this is hashed over with a directness and clarity of expression that show no advance in narrative sophistication over the films of 1918 or so, and pretty unadventurous 1918 at that. There is bigness here, in other words, in circumference of yawns, too. A lovely performance, however, by Max von Sydow, who commands so much sheer technique, so much right instinct, so much inner character, so much acquired pain-of-existence, that he is able -- he and he alone -- to get the desired clarity without any attendant exaggeration or simplification. With Pelle Hvenegaard; written and directed by Bille August. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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