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ABERDEEN Send This Review to a Friend
Norwegian writer-director Hans Petter Moland has dug deeply into family relationships and the toll of alcoholism in "Aberdeen," which impressed me deeply at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival and which is finally getting a commercial opening in the United States. The film, set mainly in Norway and Scotland, has brilliant performances and a superb, mature script. The situation itself is striking and unusual.
There is a stunning performance by Lena Headey as Kaisa, who is very successful at a law firm in London, but her life is interrupted by a burdensome request from her dying mother (Charlotte Rampling) in Aberdeen, Scotland. She wants her to travel to Norway, and bring her estranged alcoholic father Tomas (Stellan Skarsgard) to Aberdeen. He had abandoned his family ties a decade before, and Kaisa has no enthusiasm for the task, to say the least.
Skarsgard gives a shatteringly effective portrait of a man wrecked by alcoholism, with all of the ups and downs (mostly downs) and the terrible things of which he is capable because of his affliction. He is an impossible burden, and yet the finely textured performance is such as to evoke sympathy for the complex man. In the course of the trip, made by car because Tomas gets too drunk to be allowed aboard a plane, Kaisa gets to know her father more closely. En route she also meets Clive, who is played by Ian Hart in another super performance in this role of a stranger who gets involved in the family problems against his better judgment and has an influence on Kaisa's attitude toward her father. Rampling as the mother and wife turns in another sensitive performance, as one has come to expect from her.
This is a tough, stark and wrenching film because it is uncompromising in dealing with the problem of alcoholism. Striving for accuracy without sentimentality, Moland has created an accomplished work filled with dramatic rewards. A First Run Features release.
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