Hamlet by any other name: “The Northman”

After “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse”, it was pretty much assured that whatever Robert Eggers is going to do will be at least interesting and more than likely, masterful. “The Northman” is both. It is a far more sprawling work and more explicit in its themes, perhaps, but it ain’t boring.

That last clause is not damning with faint praise. There is a remarkable amount of work - thematic and narratively - that threatens to overwhelm the film. In some parts, I think it kind of does. 

While it is an unrepentantly gorgeously shot movie, there are places where the camera lingers overlong and a scene overstays its welcome. I’ve mentioned elsewhere how sometimes a director just seems to love the composition, the set-up, or hell, the composition so much to the detriment of moving forward. In Eggers here, it’s not that egregious, and I’m not of the mind that major cuts would be in order; if anything, the edits would be invisible and who knows, really, if they’d make that much of a difference. I’m sure as shit not him! (So, what about it, Hollywood? Wanna float me a short $20 million and see what I come up with? No? Can’t say I blame you!)

There is actually little to go over; the story is based off some of the legendary material that inspired Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” but it’s just this that renders both the play more fascinating and elevates the film out of the gate. 

Alexander Skarsgård plays Amleth, the scion of King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke bringing a fully realized character to a supporting role yet again) and Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman who later in the film ratchets up and fills out her character and drops a bomb that some people in the audience didn’t see coming). We begin with Amleth’s childhood and greeting the return of the king from his latest excursion. We end with his assassination at the hands of his brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang who, like Kidman, really gets to shine later in the film). 

Amleth flees and is declared dead by the henchman that Fjölnir's sent after him “Finnir the Nose Stub” is Eldar Skar’s credit since, Amleth sliced off Finnir’s nose to make his escape. We see him later in the flick, too, and his demise is pointed. 

After swearing a blood oath to avenge his father, free his mother, and slay his uncle, the camera pans in on Amleth at the oar of a long boat. He has, we can figure out, been taken in and raised as a berserker by a marauding troop of Vikings. The cub has grown into a bear-wolf for sure and on the first raid, we get a sure taste of how brutal humans can be and how cheap life was as they pillage and rape a village in the land of Rus. As they are dividing up the chattel and casually murdering and violating women and children, Amleth overhears that Fjölnir's has been overthrown and reduced to sheep-farming in Iceland.

He cuts his hair, brands himself, and infiltrates the groups of slaves bound for Fjölnir's home in exile. He is found out by Olga (of the Birch Forest), a resplendent Anya Taylor-Joy, reuniting with Eggers since her career establishing role in “The Witch.” They are both driven by vengeance and by this point, too, we are now in a world where the liminal divide between humanity and spirits is non-existent. Visions and portents are as concrete as phenomenal world before us. 

Indeed, Amleth relies on seers and witches (Bjork returning to the screen! And while it’s a brief appearance, she is riveting) and to guide him to the magic sword that will slay his uncle. Once he has the sword (after fighting an undead seven foot skeleton), his strategy is to slaughter Fjölnir's men until he can fulfill the prophecy that Fjölnir's is to be slain at a “lake of fire.”

In the meantime, he gets close to Fjölnir's circle by saving Gunnar, his half-brother, at game of Knattleikr (which reminded me of a cross between cricket and soccer; the ball is in constant play as in football but moved about with a bat and body-checking, maiming or killing your opponent is part of the game, apparently.) The kid ran out onto the playing field and was about to get his brains beaten in when Amleth took matters into his own hand. As a result, he was given his choice of women and chose Olga by Thorir, Fjölnir's’s older son (played with delightfully oily relish by Gustavo Lindh. 

Amleth’s journey mirrors Hamlet’s in some ways, but unlike Shakespeare’s Dane, our hero here is not so equivocating nor as emotionally rich or deep. Nor is Olga Ophelia, but she does share the latter’s ability to draw something out of her man that wasn’t there earlier. Amleth discovers genuine feeling for Olga that humanizes him but nonetheless, does not sway him from his mission and to be sure, theirs is a shared aim. 

Since the sword is only unsheathable at the full moon and at night or until he faces Fjölnir's, Amleth must make do with making Fjölnir’s remaining days a hellscape. He slaughters Nose Stub, for instance, and leaves hacked up bodies arranged for viewing that lead Fjölnir to believe this is the work of trolls (and not slaves, who he arms to guard the village that night.) 

Olga delivers a stew of mushroom stew (yes, those kinds of mushrooms) which leads Fjölnir’s men into madness. That same night, Amleth finds his mother and reveals himself to her but is disturbed - to put it mildly - to learn that his mother wasn’t exactly fond of her first husband. She tells him that he is the child of rape, and his father was pretty much just a brute. It was she who begged Fjölnir to kill his brother and for that matter, to have Amleth killed. Then she attempts to seduce her son. Yes. As in seduce. This set a number of audience members off, but they must not be aware of literary influences in film and that, well, this is all of a piece. Revolted, Amleth leaves and murders Thorir in his sleep and removes his heart. 

Amleth’s conflicted - though not as deeply or as thoughtfully as his later Danish namesake filtered through the greatest English playwright would be - and this is where I began to wonder if Eggers would lean more into the ambiguity that this new information would bring up. Not really. I wish that with Gudrún’s revelation, that there may have been something more to come along with that; perhaps just another shade to Amleth’s character. As I write that, though, I can see how such a change would have made for a longer film and by this point, the movie was starting to sag just a bit under the weight of recurring violence and murder. 

Naturally, Gudrún informs Fjölnir of the plot against him and Amleth is imprisoned and beaten (mightily). Later, he is freed by a flock of ravens (his father was the Raven King) and he and Olga flee the farm. We see them next on a boat bound for Orkney where Olga has relatives. Amleth has a vision that Olga is pregnant with twins, one of whom will be the Maiden King (yes, King) prophesied earlier by the witch/seeress. 

Amleth, however, recognizes that they will never be safe. Fjölnir may yet go in search of his nephew and see to it that neither he nor his bloodline survive. Olga pleads with him to stay but he jumps ship to return to murder Fjölnir. 

In short order and mostly by accident, he kills his mother and half-brother. I say mostly by accident because we can assume that he wanted to keep his oath (he also latterly included Gunnar in the mix), but also, there is a look of extreme surprise when he runs Gudrún through. Gunnar appears from a closet and stabs Amleth repeatedly, calling him a murderer louder and louder, until Amleth finishes the child, as well. Fjölnir's appears and swears that he will kill Amleth when the meet at the Gates of Hel (the volcano Hekla).

We see the bodies laying side by side and a decapitated horse at their feet as Amleth trudges forward to meet his uncle. The battle is not, thankfully, drawn out, though it is agonizing and bloody. Amleth severs Fjölnir's’s skull as his uncle plunges his sword through him. It is an ending fitting of an epic tale and this is that, if nothing else. 

And that’s just what I left with. Is this anything else? Unlike “The Witch” or “The Lighthouse”, Eggers is painting on a much larger canvas. He has never shied away from the darkness of the human psyche, but here it is writ so large, so broad, that I felt like all that had been laying beneath the surface in his first two films was now out in the open, stripped of mystery and wonder. 

Some have opined that this is an audition reel for a stab at making a “Gladiator” type film (or “Conan” or any other sword and sorcery picture), but from the interviews I’ve read, that’s not the case. Apparently, this is the movie that Eggers has been wanting to make forever and as such, my hat is off to him. However, I miss the nuance and darker reaches of our interiors that I found in “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse.”

“The Northman” is a fine film, no getting around it. But I don’t know that I’d spend much more time comparing it to Egger’s earlier films so much as I would to “The Green Knight.” The two have far more in common in terms of mythic archetypes and the hero’s quest. The melding of the visionary into our mundane world is seamless in both, though the themes are very different, of course. Lowery’s and Egger’s execution is similar, though, in execution and both bring and intimacy to their respective epics that reminds us of why sagas are so integral to our lives. They live just beneath the surface of our daily lives. That liminal space is always in front of us.

It is this last that is so tricky to handle, though, and I hope I don’t sound like I’m dunking on Eggers for not exactly succeeding in realizing this. It’s a tall order and I wonder if on a second viewing, I might change my mind. 

It helps that Eggers and his co-writer Sjon (the poet who also wrote “Lamb” and “Dancer in the Dark”) crafted a tight narrative structure on which to hang a lot of thematic and character driven weight. The structure may creak sometimes, but not so much that it detracts from what underneath its length is a fairly compact story. In fact, I’d like to read a treatment of the film as either a novel or maybe a poem based off this script.

Jarin Blaschke returns to work with Eggers with a rich tapestry of color that matches the depth and dimension of his black and white work on the previous films. Never has so much brutality looked so beautiful. And that may be another issue, as I think about it. Not the cinematography; but one more issue I have with the story and one that I hasten to point out is not unique to this film.

I am not squeamish. I am not shocked by just about anything I’ve seen or continue to see on screen. Part of that is that I just am too much aware of what goes into the effects of what I see, another is I’m just freaking old. I’ve seen a lot both on screen and in life. But I get tired by unrelenting ugliness and violence. Yes, these were harsh times to live (and die) in; but once a film takes that tack, I won’t say that I disengage, but that I feel a remove from the spectacle at hand by reduction in narrative dimension. That’s my way of saying that emphasis on one thing to the detriment of other possibilities reduces my involvement in the narrative before me. 

It’s not always a deal breaker. “Mad Max: Fury Road” comes to mind where it is for the most part, pretty goddamn grim. However, I’d also add that George Miller brought greater shades to the characters as scripted. I cared far more about Furiosa’s journey than I did here about Amleth’s on the strength of what was there in the character as encountered on screen. This is not to say that Skarsgård wasn’t remarkable. He was. However, I was not impressed that in the script was this admonition: Amleth is told by another seer/he-witch, “You must choose between kindness for your kin, and hatred for your enemies.”

This should have been, to my reading, a central theme to his arc, but we aren’t shown much “kindness” in his character to validate his choice. Unlike Hamlet, Amleth is not a man of great interiority. And therein lies the rub.

Still, it is a fine film and I think worth revisiting. I’ll continue looking to see what Eggers does next (“Nosferatu”!!!) and he has my trust that it will, at the very least, be interesting. (I really hate that word… His work is far more than that, but sometimes, “interesting” means more than damning with faint praise.)