Louder than Bombs is the first English-language film from Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier, after his critically-acclaimed 2011 film Oslo, August 31st, which I found kind of unwatchable because it was … just … so … slow. But Louder than Bombs also garnered great reviews, has a treendous cast (four actors with past Oscar nominations, plus Golden Globe winner Gabriel Byrne), and made Will Leitch’s top ten films of 2016. It’s also free for Amazon Prime members, which meant I really had no good reason not to watch it.
Of course, it’s pretty great. It’s a very understated film, and often painfully quiet, but the story here really works and even takes advantage of those long silences. The performances are good across the board, and the film includes some clever dream sequences and re-enactments that introduce its only true dramatic elements. It’s certainly not for everyone – I don’t think I would have liked this movie twenty years ago, but now I have both age and patience I lacked back then.
Louder than Bombs looks at the aftermath of the death of Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert, herself nominated for an Oscar for Elle this year) on her family, husband Gene (Byrne), not-large adult son Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg), and 14-year-old son Conrad (Devin Druid), who is the movie’s central figure because his grief, coupled with his apparent introverted nature, is the most obvious from the outside. All three men are hurting, but Conrad wears it on his sleeve a bit more, and his father and brother are unable to figure out how to help with him or cope with their own issues surrounding Isabelle’s death, which they believe, at least, was a suicide.
What works best in Louder than Bombs is the excruciatingly frail relationship Gene has with Conrad. Gene is flawed, aware of his flaws, but still a pretty reliable screw-up, and even continues to do so by having an affair with one of Conrad’s teachers (played by Amy Ryan). Conrad doesn’t know that his mother killed herself, or that she’d suffered from depression, which you’d think would be relevant given that he too may be showing signs of the same illness. He’s a little bit of a stock character – the sullen teen who hides in his room and plays video games – but there’s some complexity there that becomes apparent later in the film.
Jonah is the least well-developed of the three men in the movie, a functioning adult with a wife and newborn child, but whose marriage isn’t what it seems and who is more than willing to rekindle an old flame when he returns to his hometown to help his father go through Isabelle’s papers and files. He’s dealing with his own grief by compartmentalizing it, and thus stands in the way of his father (who might be too impetuous) telling Conrad the whole truth about their mother, because doing so might force Jonah to confront the full reality of her suicide. The film doesn’t delve into Jonah’s emotions the way it does Conrad’s or Gene’s, which is only a shame because Jonah himself could have been a more interesting character, especially if we saw why it seems like he’s acquired some of the less desirable personality traits of both his parents.
Huppert plays Isabelle’s depression in the film’s many flashbacks as a sort of sleepwalking, awake but rarely present, with a vacancy in her eyes that may not be perfectly realistic but conveys the sort of emotional absence that depression gives the sufferer. I would have enjoyed seeing more of her performance, but the film isn’t really about her; revelations about her, many of which come about because her former colleague (played by David Strathairn, whose voice is just such a pleasure to listen to) is writing an article about her life, appear to show their effects on the survivors.
It’s hard to avoid a comparison to the other big grief movie of 2016, Manchester by the Sea, but the two films differ both in story and in performances. There’s no tour de force by anyone in Louder than Bombs, but there are also signs of marginal progress for the three men by the time the movie reaches its somewhat ambiguous conclusion. Where Casey Affleck’s character can’t escape his grief (and role within it), Gene and his sons might just move beyond theirs. It’s a little bit more hopeful, but just as compelling in its portrait of survivors struggling to cope with unthinkable, unexpected loss.