On the lam: David Wiberg, Iwar Wilander, and Robert Gustafsson
“THE 100-YEAR-OLD MAN WHO CLIMBED OUT THE WINDOW AND DISAPPEARED” My rating: B- (Opening May 22 at the Glenwood Arts and Tivoli)
114 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Sweden gave us Ingmar Bergman, one of the true geniuses of the cinema.
But none of Bergman’s movies enjoyed anything like the boxoffice clout of “The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared,” a picaresque comedy based on Jonas Jonasson’s international bestseller. Felix Herngren’s film is Sweden’s biggest domestic hit ever.
Those who equate Scandinavian cinema with dour soul searching are in for a pleasant surprise. “The 100-Year-Old Man…” can best be compared to “Forrest Gump” — the shambling story of one man’s life and his many encounters with the great and powerful.
Written by Herngren and Hans Ingemansson, this is really two stories, one unfolding over a single week in the present, the other spanning several decades and continents.
The “hero” of both is Allan Karlsson (Robert Gustafsson, sporting some pretty convincing old-man makeup). In the present he’s an independent codger who on his 100th birthday stages a jailbreak from the nursing home where he reluctantly resides. He hits the road and has adventures.
Allan is a bit of a doofus. Not spectacularly stupid, but weirdly eccentric and focused on his own obsessions, particularly good liquor and blowing things up.
In the here and now Allan spends his last krona for a bus ticket, in the process absentmindedly departing with another passenger’s suitcase. The luggage is revealed to hold a fortune in cash intended for a big narcotics deal. As a result Allan and everyone he befriends on his trek will find themselves pestered by the members of a singularly inept biker gang and an international drug lord (Alan Ford) who wants his money back.
Along the way Allan teams up with Julius (Iwar Wilander), a retired stationmaster who has all sorts of ideas of how to spend their windfall, and Benny (David Wiberg), a sad-sack thirtysomething perennial student who is always changing majors and as a result seems to know something about everything.
Robert Gustafsson and friend
Their cross-country journey will take them the to farm run by the Earth-motherish Gunilla (Mia Skaringer), who is hiding a circus elephant she rescued from an abusive situation. Try being inconspicuous when there’s a pachyderm in your travel party.
As for Allan’s remarkable past, we see him during the Spanish Civil War (he’s fighting for the lefties but ends up a personal friend of Franco) and at Los Alamos NM (where his explosives prowess helps Robert Oppenheimer create the first atomic bomb). President Harry S Truman befriends Allan (they share a love of whiskey). Then our man is kidnapped by the Soviets and personally interrogated by Stalin. While imprisoned in a Siberian gulag he befriends Herbert Einstein, Albert’s idiot twin brother, who was snatched by the KGB by mistake.
These famous figures are played by anonymous actors who may or may not look like the real-world characters they are portraying. That’s a bit irritating.
Anyway, you get the picture. It’s a big shaggy-dog story, thin on character, long on epic silliness.
The film has been very well made and the performances are just low-keyed enough to give a patina of realism to the yarn’s absurdities. Nothing deep here, but some good yuks along the way.
| ROBERT W. BUTLER
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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