It wasn’t too long ago—well what’s ten years really—when Bille August was at the cutting-edge of his art, making unforgettable films that captured the darkness of the human spirit in the microcosm of his native Denmark. The budgets might have been low, and the actors virtually unknown (Max Von Sydow—in Pelle the Conqueror—excepted), but was there ever a better coming-of-age movie than Twist and Shout? Now, as one might expect, for Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Bille has Hollywood aspirations if not quite the budget or the high profile stars. Mercifully we are spared the “A” list and instead are given journeymen British actors like Tom Wilkinson and the excellent Jim Broadbent. The cast is led by the delectable Julia Ormond who plays the half-Inuit, half-white Smilla Jesperson.
Smilla is a rootless young woman who’s prickly in the extreme, and has never finished a class or held a job from which she wasn’t asked to leave. Is this because she's spiritually a Greenlander now floundering in the metropolitan wasteland that’s Copenhagen? One wouldn’t expect to find such a clichéd character in an August film (Does her father’s millions not make city life any more palatable…?). She strikes up an unlikely relationship with a young Inuit child living in her apartment building and becomes a surrogate mother. The death of this child, apparently an accidental slipping off from the roof in the snow, is a catalyst that sends Smilla along a journey that would not be out of place in a Tom Clancy (and this is no compliment) style Hollywood blockbuster.
The cinematography is brilliant. The opening shots of the Greenland tundra are breathtakingly beautiful as are the ending scenes involving the passage of the Kronan through a frozen north Atlantic to Greenland. The problem lies in between. The plot is so lurid that I have seen better skewered on MST3000. The action scenes would not be amiss in a James Bond movie and if that’s your thing this movie would make a passable thriller. On the other hand if, like me, you expect more from any film directed by Bille August you’re going to be disappointed. The screenplay is based upon a Danish thriller written by Peter Høeg and I am not sure what August could have done with it other than to decline the job of directing it. The plot is so contrived; the ending so feeble and predictable that you’ll feel cheated.
The only way to get any pleasure out of this movie is to enjoy the glorious winter landscape and the ship scenes, which are filmed on an old merchantman (Høeg was a sailor before he took to writing) plowing its way to Greenland. We can only hope that Bille August will not believe in the old maxim that you can never go home again. Bille you can and we look forward to it.