Butler's Cinema Scene

Mads Mikkelsen

“ANOTHER ROUND” My rating: B (VOD)

117 minutes | No MPAA rating

The middle-aged male psyche takes a thorough beating in Thomas Vinterberg’s “Another Round,” which acts like a black comedy before flirting with tragedy.

Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) teaches upper level  high school history at a private school in Denmark. He’s pretty much on autopilot, droning through his lessons to kids who are more interested in checking their cell phones and talking about last weekend’s binge.

Things aren’t much better at home. His teenage sons view him as  a slight embarrassment; he hardly sees his wife (Maria Bonnevie), who works nights.

“Have I become boring?” he wonders.

Martin’s only close human relationships, apparently, are three coworkers:  Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), the phys ed instructor; Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), who teaches psychology; and Peter (Lars Ranthe), the music director.

All four gentlemen are stuck in the midlife doldrums. They desperately need a change.

Over a birthday dinner Nikolaj brings up the work of a scientist who maintains that the average person’s blood alcohol content is about .05 % below optimum operating levels.  This great mind (or is he a quack?) recommends a steady but controlled intake of alcohol throughout the working day, with nothing consumed after 8 p.m.

Hey…it worked for Ulysses S. Grant, Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill.

The four friends decide to make a scientific study with themselves as the guinea pigs. The goal is to achieve “optimal professional and personal performance.” They’ll keep a detailed journal; call it “collecting evidence.”

What could go wrong?

At first being slightly hammered pays off big time.  All of a sudden our subjects’ classroom lectures are scintillating and provocative.  The kids perk up; learning is fun again.

Martin’s sex life with the Missus gets an unexpected shot in the arm. And as an added benefit, he’s resumed the jazz dancing that he gave up in his early adulthood.

“I haven’t felt this good in ages,” he enthuses.

Yeah, there is the problem of keeping all that imbibing a secret. Vodka replaces water in plastic bottles. Easily secreted pints  and flasks find their way into pockets and briefcases. Tommy’s multi-bottle stash in the athletic department storeroom is discovered by a custodian, but it’s easy to pin the blame on unnamed students.

But as the quartet slowly increase their daily dosage, their behavior goes a bit off the rails. Nikolaj explains it away in scientific terms as “emancipated psychological effects.”  Try telling that to their spouses, children and the school administration. All they see are drunks.

The performances are uber realistic, which is to say even though these characters act foolishly, we never see the players angling for a laugh. Vinterberg, one of the founders of the austere Dogme film movement, is big on slightly detached observation. He lets us draw our own conclusions.

It falls to the the excellent cast to bring the story to life. Happily, Mikkelsen is one of the cinema’s great stars, a guy who can take the most outlandish character — a cannibal, say, or a berserking Viking warrior — and somehow make him absolutely plausible.

Ultimately “Another Round” is less about alcohol abuse than about finding your inner joy…hopefully without excessive imbibing.

| Robert W. Butler