Family Values: Review of Sentimental Value
★★★1/2
By Geoff Carter
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
Leo Tolstoy once said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and every unhappy family can show their misery in a myriad of ways—they’re only limited by their imaginations. Whether that unhappiness erupts in fistfights, broken dishes, heated arguments, Thanksgiving Day shouting matches, or evinces itself in more civilized manifestations like deathly silences, cold shoulders, unspoken grudges, or calculated betrayals, the ways we hate the people we love is the very stuff from which drama is made.
From Medea to King Lear to Ordinary People to Interiors to What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? to The Sopranos, these sorts of stories have been capturing the dysfunctional family experience for centuries, while more recent films like Father Mother Sister Brother and Hamnet have continued this tradition.
Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is the story of a family suffering from the scars of a bad marriage and a neglectful father. The opening sequence focuses of the Borg house, which has been in the father’s family for generations. Trier focuses the camera on the house lovingly, the narrator telling stories of its past, revealing its flaws, and even relating how Nora wrote a story about it, a tale that seemed strangely distant—even to her.
The film proper opens as two sisters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Indsbotter Lilleaas) Borg are holding a wake for their mother Sissel. Both are surprised when their estranged father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgard) shows up. Borg is a renowned movie director who has recently fallen on fallow times.
After his divorce from Sissel, Gustav left Norway to pursue his career, rarely seeing his daughters. Nora has become a successful actress who is single and has difficulties with intimacy and commitment. Agnes, on the other, is happily married with a young son and is workng as an historian. Gustav tells his daughters he has come to reclaim the house; although he had promised it to his ex-wife Sissell, they never completed the proper paperwork. His presence reopens old family wounds. Both daughters grew to resent him because of his absences, and his renewed microaggressions aggravate Nora in particular.
In an effort to reinvigorate his flagging career, Gustav tells the girls he has written a script and wants to film it in the family house. The movie is about Gustav’s mother Karin, who fought with the Resistance during World War II, and who eventually passed away in the house when Gustave was a boy. He attempts to persuade Nora to play the role of Karin, but she flat out refuses to even read the script.
Gustav later happens to meet movie star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) at a screening of one of his older films. She gushes over it, the two hang out, and he eventually asks her to star in his new movie playing the role he had originally offered to Nora—partly because her involvement would ensure funding for the project.
Gustav starts film production in the family home, remodeling it to fit in with his vision—which also happens to be his memories of his mother during that time. It soon becomes apparent that he is making the film as either an apology for or an explanation of his role as a father. In a way, as many artists do, he is trying to rehabilitate his relationship with his family through his art.
In the meantime, Nora is dealing with her own demons. She suffers from debilitating stage fright, suffers from debilitating depressions, and carries a truckload of resentment—richly deserved—against her father. She does enjoy playing with her young nephew and has a good relationship with her sister. Agnes has problems with their dad but is less caustic and more understanding of him.
The avenues taken by this singularly unhappy family to reach détente or even an impasse in the dynamics of their relationships is to say the least, complex. Filmmaker and patriarch Gustav is either attempting to work out kinks in his own past by recreating them through his own artistic vision. Whether his relationship with his mother remains fraught with the ghosts of his anger, guilt, or grief remains obscure to the viewer. We can only surmise what he is going through.
When Agnes goes to research what happened to her grandmother—Gustav’s mom—after she was arrested by the Nazis, revelations of her fate reveal a quiet heroism and an even greater degree of pain than she had imagined.
As in real family life, complexity is layered upon complexity. When she was a child, Agnes once starred in one of her father’s films. He now wants Nora to play his mother figure in another film. When Nora refuses, he brings in Rachel as a substitute. Art reflects life—like a funhouse mirror.
The idea of art as a catharsis is nothing new. We all know that listening to pieces like Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” or watching a film It’s a Wonderful Life release all sorts of repressions. We’ve seen this process in films as recent as the beautifully moving Hamnet, when Agnes realizes her husband’s play Hamlet is not only an acknowledgement of their son’s death but also an absolution. Yet the question remains as to whether using this trope in a movie is kind of cheap way out—an easy resolution.
Not so in Sentimental Value. Starting at the very beginning of the film, the history and sensibilities are so deeply layered and nuanced that nothing—especially sorting them out through the artistic process—is simple. Memories echo from the walls of the family home into every nook and cranny of the present life.
This is an intricately calibrated and beautifully written movie that boasts an incredibly talented cast. From the grimly pensive and moodily determined Gustav to the stolid and steady Agnes to the incredibly dysfunctional and neurotic Nora, all fit into their own special space in the jigsaw of this particularly unhappy family. As Rachel, Elle Fanning brings a fresh-faced innocence and naivete (tempered with a painfully self-conscious set of insecurities) that Gustav has to see as a reflection of what his daughters once were.
Sentimental Value is what could probably be termed a “vibe” film, like Train Dreams or—yes—Hamnet. The plot neither pushes nor pulls the viewer. They are rather caught in a current, drifting through a tangle of lives and relationships coming slowly, painfully, and, thankfully, undone.
This is one of those films that, in order to attain a complete understanding of what the filmmakers were after, probably needs to be viewed more than once. Like the Borg home, every nook or cranny of this film holds memory—and meaning. We might find it if we have the patience to look for it in every shadow, every dark place, then—maybe—we might see a shadow ourselves in this family history, their very personal pain, and the possibilities of the power of forgiveness.