Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE HUNT”  My rating: B+ (Now showing at the Tivoli)

115 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Is Mads  Mikkelsen is our greatest living movie actor, the Olivier of our era?

Exhibit A is the melancholy Dane’s latest film, “The Hunt.”

In it Mikkelsen portrays an average guy accused of a horrible crime – child molestation – and caught up in a Kafkaesque situation in which he cannot prove that the crime didn’t happen, all the while being driven further away from the community he calls home.

Directed by Thomas Vinterberg, one of the founders of the austere Dogme 95 avant-garde filmmaking movement, this tale is so excruciating that it takes a bravura central performance to make it bearable.

Naturally, Mikkelsen delivers.

Of course there are plenty of other impressive  Mikkelson perfs to be sampled: the bloodthirsty Viking berserker in Nicholas Winding Refn’s  “Valhalla Rising,” the suave but majorly disturbed villain of the Bond flick “Casino Royale,” an idealistic aid worker caught up in a corrupt rich family in “After the Wedding,” or the psycho/cannibal/psychiatrist title character of the current NBC series “Hannibal.”

Whatever the project, Mikkelsen lifts everything around him.

Here he plays Lucas, a teacher in a small Danish town who is putting his lonely life back together after several setbacks.

He used to teach at a middle school, but he was downsized. Now he’s employed by a kindergarten where he’s beloved by staff and kids (the latter group uses him like a human jungle gym).

His ex-wife has had custody of their teenage son and until recently would allow the boy to visit Lucas only every other weekend.  Now young Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrom) has made such a fuss that Lucas’ ex agrees to let him live with his father.

And Lucas’ love life has improved, thanks to Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport),  a cook at the school.

Job. Child. Woman. Everything is looking up.

At least until little Klara (Annika Wedderkopp), the four-year-old daughter of Lucas’ lifelong best friend, gets mad at him and tells another teacher that she has seen Lucas’ erect penis. (How, you wonder, does a child even know such stuff?  She glimpsed a porn website on her older brother’s computer tablet.)

And at that point it all starts falling apart for poor Lucas.

Annika Wedderkopp…the accuser

This isn’t a police procedural. There’s no third-degree down at the precinct, no courtroom theatrics. The screenplay by Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm is consumed almost exclusively with the way Lucas responds to his impossible situation now that people who have known him all their lives think him a monster.

As a bit of social observation, “The Hunt” (the title refers to the fact that seemingly every man in the village is an avid sportsman) makes the point that in the face of a horrendous crime (or even the suspicion of one), many of us become brutally judgmental, indignant and downright cruel.

The picture also points out the snowball effect…when the other children are asked whether they, too, have been molested by Lucas, many  say that they have, perhaps in an attempt to please their parents and questioners. (The screenplay has much in common with the notorious McMartin Preschool  case in which more than 300 California children claimed to have been molested but no one was ever convicted in the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history.)

But just as vital to the film’s success is Mikkelsen’s portrayal of a decent man accused of indecency, who finds himself a pariah in the community he has long loved — ostracized, banned from shopping at the local grocery, and dodging bricks chucked through his windows.

This is wonderfully subtle acting. You can see Lucas fighting the impulse to strike out, to become the creature everyone thinks he is.  And at the same time Mikkelsen’s nails the character’s genuine love of his neighbors and the children he works with.

In act, the acting all around is top notch here. Two of the prominent child actors – Fogelstrom as Lucas’ loving son and Wedderkopp as his accuser – are remarkable, and I was also struck by Thomas Bo Larsen’s portrayal of the girl’s father, a good-natured oaf torn between love for his child and for his best friend.

| Robert W. Butler