Butler's Cinema Scene

Lars Mikkelsen

“HERRENS VEJE (RIDE UPON THE STORM” (Netflix)

Being a member of the  clergy is a 24/7 tightrope walking act. Worshipers  expect their holy leaders to be fully human without exhibiting the usual human screwups.

The family of priests in the Danish series “Herrrens Veje” (it translates as “The Lord’s Ways” but Netflix is calling it “Ride Upon the Storm”) have screwups galore.  But, boy, they are truly human. And then some.

Lars Mikkelsen (older brother of fellow actor Mads) stars in this two-season drama as Johannes, a ninth-generation vicar serving a congregation in Copenhagen.

Johannes is outwardly a man at peace with his life and work.  After all, he is fulfilling the important role assigned his family over several centuries, and he’s determined that his own sons carry on the tradition.

Inside though, Johannes carries the scars of his own strict and borderline abusive upbringing. As the series begins (it’s from the same folks who gave us the brilliant “Borgen” about Danish politics) he loses an election for bishop to a female priest, who embodies all the wishywashy qualities which, in his mind, have set the Church of Denmark on the road to obscurity.

Ann Eleonora Jorgensen, Lars Mikkelsen

Johannes’ bitterness at this rejection drives him to alcohol abuse and an affair with a member of his staff…although the more we get to know him the more we’re convinced that his particular brand of toxic masculinity eventually would have taken him down those dark paths.

Yeah, this is a troublesome character.  But Mikkelsen brings so much charisma and inner fire to the proceedings that we understand why Johannes’ parishioners and his employees stick with him. At his best he’s a genuinely dynamic leader. (BTW: Mikkelsen won the 2018 International Emmy for his performance here.)

Morten Hee Andersen, Simon Sears as brothers August and Christian

As much as it’s about Johannes, “Herrens Veje” is about other members of his family.  These include his wife Elisabeth (an incandescent Ann Eleonora Jorgensen) and his sons Christian (Simon Sears) and August (Morten Hee Andersen).

Over the course of the first season Elisabeth will be driven by her husband’s bull-headedness into the arms of another woman.

August, an army chaplain, will return from a peacekeeping tour of the Middle East haunted by the ghost of a woman he killed during a chaotic firefight.

Christian, the family’s black sheep, has already flunked out of seminary and been expelled from business college for cheating.  He and a buddy go to Nepal; an accident leaves Christian recuperating in a Buddhist monastery.  When he comes home he starts using the life lessons he learned from the monks to launch a self-help program.  You can imagine how much his doctrinaire dad digs that.

The series also widens its net to include Christian’s business partner and lover, a Muslim woman (Camilla Liu), and August’s wife (Fanny Louise Bernth), an M.D. not entirely enamored with her in-laws’ religious attitudes.

“Herrens Veje” is an intriguing blend of melodrama and sharp observations about religion and contemporary Danish society.  It’s as if someone had taken all that Scadanavian angst of Bergman’s tormented priest period (“Winter Light,” “Through a Glass Darkly,” “The Silence”) and revved it up with a good dose of prime time soap.

And what’s really remarkable (some may view it as a copout) is that the series doesn’t take sides.  Despite the flaws of its characters, “Herren Veje” is not dismissive of religion.  It shows the power of faith, while driving home the point that the faithful are far from perfect.

In fact, leading man Mikkelsen, who was raised by a family of atheists, credits his portrayal of Johannes with his own recent conversion to the Church of Denmark.

| Robert W. Butler