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Norwegian oddballs strike universal chord
Friday, July 5, 2002
A 2001 Oscar nominee for best foreign language film, "Elling" won the Golden Space Needle Award as the best movie at this year's Seattle International Film Festival and Kevin Spacey has already announced an American remake.
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This tale of kooky social misfits finding their place in the world is an audience pleaser, for all the reasons such tales usually are.
Forty-year-old Elling (Per Christian Ellefsen) is a paranoid, self described "mommy's boy" sent to a psychiatric hospital after a mental meltdown following his mother's death. The articulate, educated obsessive is fastidious and defiantly private (he's bedeviled by the demand that he open up his private life in group therapy sessions), as opposite as can be from his simple "orangutan" of a roommate, Kjell Bjarne (Sven Nordin).
Dimwitted, hygienically challenged and apt to pound his head repeatedly into furniture and walls when frustrated, this hulking sex-obsessed virgin becomes Elling's unlikely best (and only) friend after Elling regales him with tall tales of sexual exploits and world traveling adventures.
In reality, Elling is terrified to cross the street, let alone cross the globe. It's just one of the challenges he faces when the two are sprung from the protective safety of the institution and unleashed into the outside world of Oslo.
Peter Naess' quirky little odd couple comedy about oddballs navigating real-world crises such as shopping, answering the phone and using public toilets hits every cliche we've come to expect, including the assumption that "crazy" people are innocent, childlike and inherently funny. Naess can't entirely refresh this stock situation, but he does invest his pair with something more than saintly purity and kooky obsessions.
Ellefsen gives aspiring poet Elling a sometimes unpleasantly contentious, jealous nature along with the self-possessed ambition of a creative eccentric riddled with phobias. He narrates the tale with bemused commentary on the outside world and askew self-reflection.
Nordin gives an instinctive generosity to the big-hearted teddy bear Bjarne. For all the puppy love nervousness of his first romance (with the vulnerable pregnant single upstairs), he invests his outsized feelings with an intense sincerity. As these two slowly build their communal family of equally neurotic characters, they settle into the comfort of their own offbeat individuality.
The characters are just damaged enough to remain interesting, giving enough to be endearing and emotionally needy enough to surmount the cliches and become human beings.
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