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.
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