What else can be around this dark corner but redemption?
“Adam’s Apples” is a tough sell. So rather than hyping or demolishing it, how
about a few thoughts that might trigger either your quirky appreciation of the
improbable or your straightforward dislike of the impossible. Then you alone can
decide whether to see it – without any help from me.
When Adam
(Ulrich Thomsen) arrives by train in a Danish village, he is met by the local
pastor, Ivan (Mads Mikkelsen). Adam, we learn, is newly released from jail and
will serve a community service term under Ivan’s compassionate eye. Adam is a
neo-Nazi who will hang a picture of Hitler on his wall. Already on this
redemptive campus are Gunnar (Nicholas Bro), a sexual assaulter and thief, and
Khalid (Ali Kazim), an Afghan ideologue who robs gas stations that symbolize
multinational power.
If you have
an advanced sensitivity to dark humor, here’s where the comedy comes in: Ivan is
no ordinary pastor. His physical realm is his beautiful church, always empty,
and a metaphorical apple tree of which he is very proud. His emotional realm is
entirely different. His wife died, leaving him with a child completely crippled
and confined to a wheel chair by cerebral palsy. But Ivan talks of the child’s
fine progress with his homework and other projects of a mind now gone to some
distant place. There is no reality for this minister or for his flock of three –
make that four with the arrival of Sarah (Paprika Steen), a pregnant woman
looking for help. The image of Sarah’s predicament with this quartet of loonies
does bring a rolling chuckle as we realize how carefully the group has been
constructed to explore unreality.
Adam, it
turns out, has a circle of thugs for friends, and they turn up now and then to
beat people senseless, something Adam has already done to his minister. After
that particular beating, Ivan the minister drags his bloodied self from the
floor and announces quietly to Adam that he’s going to the emergency room.
Until that
moment I would not have believed I would catch myself laughing at cruelty, but
that’s what is meant, perhaps, by a finely honed sense of the impossible. The
Reverend Ivan has no reality, only his faith. Every time he starts to talk, a
religious lesson issues forth. He excuses everything on religious grounds, far
fetched beyond imagining, including the fact of his own beating by Adam and of
Adam’s determination to erase his faith.
The movie is
full of politically incorrect words and actions and a main character who floats
in another world. He sees only good. The neo-Nazi sees only evil. What else can
be around this dark corner but redemption? But not of the ordinary sort. Anders
Thomas Jensen wrote and directed the film and found a number of fans in Cannes
and on the festival circuit. Only the final wrap up tickled my funny bone, but
then I’m a little too literal minded for sophisticated darkness.
Copyright (c) Illusion