A War

A War

This Danish movie starts in Afghanistan where Danish peacekeepers are checking a barren area for landmines. They’re working carefully and methodically, talking to their base and getting advised by its commanders and intel officers. But something’s clearly about to go wrong does and the consequences will be felt most keenly by the commanding officer, Claus Pedersen. It’s a matter of guilt that leads Pedersen, who has already sent one shell shocked soldier out on camp patrol, but also something more. For what feels like the first time in his career, Pedersen is beginning to act like an actual commander: He’s going outside the wire with his men. He may not realize it yet, but he’s just made himself obsolete.

I won’t give away any plot points in Tobias Lindholm’s gut-churning movie which I think is best seen almost cold, without benefit of spoiler-alert preemptive service-journalism second-guessing except to say that Pedersen (Pilou Asbaek, superb) is a good man. He’s a good soldier too, or so we’re told. But what does it mean to be “good” at warfare? “A War” poses the question quietly but unmistakably. Ernest Hemingway could have supplied the script and much of the dialogue for this film: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

After Pedersen and his troops are drawn into a brutal ambush through methods that will make your blood boil with anger and frustration (and maybe something more), Pedersen does something that brings an end to his tour of duty and calls him back home to Denmark as a defendant in a war crimes trial. There he must confront his conscience against the dry imperatives of self-preservation voiced by the defense attorney who says to him flatly, “I’m here to create acquittals, not deal with moral or ethical questions.”

This is one of those movies where it’s helpful to pay attention: during the ambush scene especially, when you’re dropped into such a noisy confusing predicament along with Pedersen & Co. that it’s impossible even just to keep track of what’s going on, let alone decide what you yourself would do in his place; maybe most importantly because holy mackerel do the consequences of what he DOES do become evident quickly and appallingly.

Whose side are you on? Whose side is the movie on? Asbaek has such an appealing presence as an actor that you may find yourselves taking up with him even though prosecuting magistrate Lisbeth Danning (Charlotte Munck), sitting up there smirking and pouting on her petulant side of the screen, makes some pretty good points. (Even if it’s a little unfair that they’re so well cooked.) But this movie is evenhanded; she is not wrong.

Lindholm’s quiet authority in rendering all the aspects of the story the soldiering, the camaraderie, the domestic travails of Pedersen’s wife as she copes with their three young children whose behaviors are mutating at approximately the same rate as their father’s legal status, the bland but also imposing officiousness of the military tribunal is exemplary. It reminds me of Asghar Farhadi’s definite but unimposing style when he takes on not quite similar but also unfathomably difficult moral conundrums. “A War,” though hard to watch, is a deeply unsettling (in a good way) experience.

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