[The Northman is about a glowering, muscle-bound man-mountain
named Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård, son of Stellan) who as a
boy witnesses the killing of his father, King Aurvandill (Ethan
Hawke), and the abduction of his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole
Kidman), by the king’s betraying half-bastard brother Fjölnir
(Claes Bang). Amleth vows revenge.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

NORTHMAN IS AN HONORABLE FAILURE  
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Eileen Jones
May 6, 2022
Jacobin
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_ The Northman is about a glowering, muscle-bound man-mountain named
Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård, son of Stellan) who as a boy
witnesses the killing of his father, King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke),
and the abduction of his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), by the
king’s betraying half-bastard brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang). Amleth
vows revenge. _

All through The Northman, it seems as if the Viking epic was directed
by someone working in the style of Robert Eggers but without his
ability to zero in on the specific shots and scenes to make a
compelling vision of the past come alive. , Focus Features

 

I was so looking forward to _The Northman,_ I’m bewildered to
report that it didn’t dazzle me, that I gazed on this Viking epic
largely unmoved. A serious disappointment.

And I like Viking movies. If I can get decent longboats, berserker
fights, vengeful slaves, axe-throwing, and the chilling moan of those
crazy goat horns, I don’t even mind if stuff gets a little cheesy.
Bonus points for Ernest Borgnine in _The Vikings_ (1958) yelling
“Odin!” as he leaps into a pit of ravenous wolves, sword in hand.

Possibly others don’t share my enthusiasm, since the film’s anemic
release is generating reports
[[link removed]] on
its dire failure with the public:

BACKED BY UNIVERSAL’S FOCUS FEATURES, _THE NORTHMAN_ IS ROBERT
EGGERS’ FIRST LAUNCH INTO STUDIO FILMMAKING AND MAINSTREAM
HOLLYWOOD, WITH THE DIRECTOR’S PREVIOUS PROJECTS, _THE
WITCH_ (2015) AND _THE LIGHTHOUSE_ (2019), MAKING WAVES ON A MUCH
SMALLER SCALE AS INDIE HORRORS. UNFORTUNATELY, _THE NORTHMAN_’S
OPENING WEEKEND WAS A BOX OFFICE BOMB, BRINGING IN ONLY $12 MILLION
DOMESTICALLY — $23 MILLION IN TOTAL GLOBALLY — AGAINST EGGERS’
QUOTED $70-90 MILLION BUDGET.

Of course, it could be people just didn’t care for _this_ Viking
movie.

_The Northman_ is about a glowering, muscle-bound man-mountain named
Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård, son of Stellan) who as a boy
witnesses the killing of his father, King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke),
and the abduction of his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), by the
king’s betraying half-bastard brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang). Amleth
vows revenge.

If that sounds vaguely like _Hamlet,_ it’s by design. It seems
Shakespeare adapted his play from old Norse sagas, and director Robert
Eggers is a stickler for them and Norse history in general, hiring
scholars to fact-check him throughout the development process.

But first Amleth has to escape, grow up, and channel his hate,
“which runs like a freezing river through my veins,” into the
berserker lifestyle. Finally, he resumes his quest for revenge,
disguising himself as a slave so he can be shipped off with the others
to the Iceland settlement run by King Fjölnir, who by now has already
lost the kingdom he usurped in Norway.

For the first time in an Eggers film, the casting is a distracting
problem. In _The Witch,_ the luminous Anya Taylor-Joy in her
star-making debut led an inspired ensemble, and in _The Lighthouse_,
Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe gave performances of awe-inspiring
conviction in impossibly demanding roles.

But in _The Northman_, dull brooder Skarsgård makes you realize how
highly watchable Arnold Schwarzenegger was in _Conan the
Barbarian_ (1982), which just happens to be one of Eggers’s
inspirations, along with Andrei Tarkovsky’s _Andrei Rublev_. Even
more frustrating is the fact that frequently standing next to
Skarsgård is a far more scintillating actor, Anya Taylor-Joy, who’s
given very little to do as Olga, a witchy slave captured in the raid
on the Land of Rus by the gang of Vikings that included Amleth.

Once in Iceland, Amleth and Olga sneak off frequently behind hillocks
to plan their slave revolt. Olga says darkly, “Your strength breaks
men’s bones. I have the cunning to break their minds.”

Which sounds pretty cool, but unfortunately you sit through the entire
film waiting for her to do some mind-breaking, and she never does. She
mixes up a batch of hallucinogenic soup at one point, but that’s the
extent of it.

There’s something so basically off about the whole project, I can
only wonder: What happened to you, Robert Eggers? Cowriting with
Sjón, an Icelandic poet and novelist, Eggers brings his usual
obsession with historical accuracy to bear on the film, cross-checking
his script and locations and costumes and props and everything else
against what leading scholars say about the North Atlantic at the turn
of the tenth century. Eggers’s obsession with minutia led to wild
choices like Alexander Skarsgård wearing the same pair of boots
throughout the entire shoot, repaired with strips of leather when they
fell apart.

Eggers enthused
[[link removed]],
“More impressive than the Vikings doing all the things they did was
that they did it in, like, _moccasins_.”

We must laud these excesses, this fixation on weird-but-true history,
because it thwarts the typical Disneyfication of older, stranger
worlds that we tend to see in Hollywood. And this approach worked
wonderfully in Eggers’s triumphant debut, _The Witch_, and in his
even more daring follow-up film, _The Lighthouse_. But somehow here
it’s run him aground.

All through _The Northman_, it seems as if the Viking epic was
directed by someone working in the style of Robert Eggers but without
his ability to zero in on the specific shots and scenes to make a
compelling vision of the past come alive. In _The Witch_, it’s
those handheld shots from the back of the family wagon, roughly
sharing the point of view of the children as their Puritan
community’s big wooden gates shut on them, consigning them to their
fates in the terrifying seventeenth-century wilderness. In _The
Lighthouse_, it’s those first black-and-white shots (in a vintage,
square-shaped aspect ratio) of that godforsaken rock off the coast of
1890s New England.

_The Northman_ has all the lavish resources studios can command, and
it looks extraordinarily handsome throughout, shot by the same gifted
cinematographer as Eggers’s previous films, Jarin Blaschke. It’s
got gorgeous scenery, wonderful firelit interiors, cool beards and
braids, nice fur wraps, and even Bjork in a small role as a scary
seeress. But somehow those key shots that ignite the imagination and
deliver you into the power of the narrative never appear.

In interviews, Eggers complained
[[link removed]] about
studio interference in his attempts to make the most entertaining
Robert Eggers movie he could deliver for the money:

FRANKLY, I DON’T THINK I WILL DO IT AGAIN. EVEN IF IT MEANS, LIKE,
NOT MAKING A FILM THIS BIG EVER AGAIN. . . . AND BY THE WAY, I’D
LIKE TO MAKE A FILM THIS BIG. I’D LIKE TO MAKE ONE EVEN BIGGER. BUT
WITHOUT CONTROL, I DON’T KNOW. IT’S TOO HARD ON MY PERSON.

But he’s also walked back those earlier remarks, insisting that the
film represents no loss of authorship and that the studio’s role
through postproduction was necessary to achieve the best version
of _The Northman_. Still, it seems clear that he’s ambiguous at
best about the process of making big-budget mainstream movies that
almost inevitably involve a lot of interference from studio brass.

If you read about Eggers’s childhood as a wunderkind encouraged at
every turn by intellectual and creative adults to fulfill his
potential, it seems he’s had such a rarefied experience overall,
it’s made him unlikely to thrive in the meat-grinder system of the
mainstream film industry.

As Eggers put it
[[link removed]] himself,
when asked why he thought test-screening audiences were having trouble
with earlier cuts of _The Northman_, he said, “Currently, with my
best intentions, like, I’m not normal. I look like a poster boy for
a Bushwick hipster, but that is where my relatability ends, I fear.”

It’s that “I fear” at the end of the sentence that marks Eggers
as a reader, a dreamer, one of those obsessive kids who lives in their
heads full of art and history and fantasy and as a result talks in
unusual phraseology even into adulthood. (Guess how I know!)

Eggers admits he was initially indifferent to Norse sagas, which were
“too macho for my sensibilities.” It was his wife, clinical
psychologist Alexandra Shaker, who inspired him
[[link removed]] with
her love of all that blood-spewing, bonebreaking, honor-killing
folklore. And it could be that it’s just not an ideal meeting of
writer-director and subject matter. The film’s an honorable failure,
in my view, but I also feel a certain urgency in saying that the
sooner Robert Eggers goes back to his previous independent mode of
filmmaking on subjects that obsess him personally from the start, the
better.

* Film [[link removed]]
* Film Review [[link removed]]
* The Northman [[link removed]]
* Robert Eggers [[link removed]]
* Viking Epic [[link removed]]

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