The prolific Danish writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen has directed six films and all six have starred Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas. Their latest collaboration, “The Last Viking,” is certainly one of their best.
Anker, a career criminal, has just hidden the loot from his latest heist in a locker. Knowing the police are on his tail, he returns home where he lives with his sister Freja and brother Manfred. He gives the key to the locker to Manfred with instructions on how to retrieve it and where to hide it. He knows the hiding place well because it is at their mother’s home in the country, located within an idyllic woodsy setting. It doesn’t take genius to notice that Manfred is not all there, sitting stone-faced on the sofa as he takes puzzle pieces out of a box, lays them against the cover and then throws them onto the floor. As expected, the police arrive and Anker is hauled off.
Fast forward 15 years and Anker is up for parole. Against the odds, and his anger issues, Anker is released and hurries home. Before he can settle in, however, he is unceremoniously greeted by the inappropriately-named Nice Flemming, his partner in the heist. He demands Anker’s portion of the ill-gotten gains for no other reason than he’s already spent all of his. Punctuating his demand with a hammer to the head, he gives Anker the proverbial “until Monday” to come up with the money. But Anker has returned to a different situation than the one he left. Their mother has since died, Freja is a whimpering mess and Manfred is no longer Manfred; he now calls himself John. His hold on reality was always limited at best but the disappearance of Anker broke his fragile hold on the bit of outward sanity he maintained. As a child, Anker was his protector, the one who promised he would never leave. Manfred liked to dress up as a Viking, making him the brunt of jokes and a target for bullying at school. Worse, their father beat both boys mercilessly; Manfred because of his mental limitations and Anker because his efforts at preventing his brother from being the butt of ridicule were usually unsuccessful. When Anker disappeared to jail for 15 years, Manfred lost his lifeline to the real world.
Anker, unable to comprehend the changes in Manfred, refused to accommodate him. But calling him Manfred instead of John sets Manfred on a suicidal path. Showing himself to be almost as limited as Manfred when faced with a conundrum, Anker must find a way to break through Manfred’s shell and find out where he hid the loot. Perhaps he might have started down the right path if he had humored his brother and called him John, but he’s not just any John; Manfred believes he is John Lennon.
With the threat of Flemming hanging over his head, he breaks Manfred out of the hospital and piles him into the car. He drives straight to the family home in the woods where, surely, the environment will trigger something. What is triggered, however, by Anker’s continued refusal to call his brother John, is another suicide attempt that sends Manfred to a psychiatric ward. Now it’s not just the missing loot, but the missing brother who he must kidnap from the hospital. Along the way, he meets a psychiatrist who explains Manfred’s illness. He has dissociative identity disorder, what many refer to as split or multiple personalities. Although Anker recognizes him only as Manfred, Manfred truly believes he is John Lennon, a state that must be acknowledged by Anker if he wants to break through. Although writer/director Jensen likens this to Walt Whitman’s “We are multitudes” expression, a more accepting explanation than the fact that Manfred is stark raving bonkers. Manfred’s reality as John is his and his alone. This is not his true self but somewhere he has gone to protect himself from the ghosts of his past, one of whom is Anker.
The journey that the two of them go on will be quite circuitous, hilarious and dangerous. Returning to the family home, they find the new owners, Margrethe and Werner, eager to welcome them. It takes very little time for Anker to realize that they, too, are delusional, although in a more innocent way. The film shows them to harbor self identifications that are contrary to the truth. Jensen is, in his own way, asking what place self-identification has in the general scheme of things. There are banal examples, such as the couple, where the harm is greater in denying an individual their own chosen identity than in letting them hold on to their illusions.
Soon this not so merry, but confused group is joined by Lothar, the very jovial psychiatrist who helped Anker release Manfred from the hospital. He had at the time suggested that what Manfred needed to return to his true self was to follow his John persona to a helpful end. He has brought with him two other deluded patients that he broke out of their respective institutions—a Ringo and a George, who in his multiple identities is also a Paul as well as a Bjorn Ulvaenus of ABBA, sort of a three for one. It doesn’t help that only George/Paul/Bjorn knows how to play an instrument. Manfred/John with a guitar he cannot play is convincing to no one, perhaps not even to himself. Not to worry. George/Paul/Bjorn (mostly Bjorn) has promised to teach him.
If this sounds complicated, don’t forget that Flemming isn’t far behind, waiting for Manfred to reveal where the money is hidden. And to top it all off, as if it weren’t already over the top, Lothar isn’t who he says he is. As Anker begins to realize how important his brother has always been to him, he also begins to see the cracks in his own reality. The return to the former house where brutality was an everyday occurrence starts to unravel Anker’s memories of long forgotten deeds. Who, he wonders, was the protector and who was the protected?
Jensen feels that his theme is one of acceptance and the discovery of one’s true self. All of the characters in “The Last Viking” are delusional, not the least Anker whose presence awakens long dormant bad memories. There are no “true selves” on display, only fabricated identities that keep the wolves at bay. Much like Philippe de Broca’s classic film “The King of Hearts,” sometimes the inmates are the sane harbor in an insane world. But like unconditional love, there are times when you must accept what you are given, warts and all. There are far more twists and turns than I have revealed and they keep everything moving at a very fast clip. Jensen, the writer, ties up the loose ends at the finale and Jensen the director keeps all the balls in the air until they necessarily start to either deflate or fall.
The casting was superb, filled with some of the very best actors working internationally. Sofie Gråbøl was a self-satisfied delusional Margrethe whose interplay with her equally delusional husband Werner, played by Søren Malling, grounded the film in their false reality. Sophie should be well-known to American audiences from her role in the original “The Killing” and Malling for his role as the newspaper editor in “Borgen.” Bodil Jørgensen was a suitably weepy Freja and Nicholas Bro was a terrifying, yet hilarious Nice Flemming. Lars Brygmann as Lothar adds both comic relief and clinical explanation in his role as the psychiatrist. But it is Nikolaj Lie Kaas as Anker and the always exceptional Mads Mikkelsen as brothers Anker and Manfred, respectively who are the reasons to see this film. It was great to become acquainted with Kaas whose constantly perplexed face is an expression of the confusion all around him (and us). Mikkelsen’s vision of insanity is so understandable and heart-breaking that one aches for him and the origin of his obsessions. He is a national treasure.
Now playing at the Laemmle Royal and on most VOD platforms.
