At any given moment, one may be seized by the impression that life is empty, blank, meaningless. In order to distract oneself, one turns to food, sex, photography. In such a mood, one must choose carefully to ensure the cure isn't worse than the disease. Don't select something more boring than your own boredom. Do not, in such a mood, go to Landmark Theatres to sit through 109 minutes of pouts, posturing, and petulance spliced together under the heading Louder Than Bombs, starting Friday, April 22.
Isabelle Huppert is a great actress, no question. She is not as good an actress in English as she is in French. I don't think she really understands the language, or the cultural values embedded in the language, well enough to connect her viscera to our vowels. She remains mired in her Frenchness, and unless a director understands this, she'll never give a great performance in English. As a war photographer whose roles of wife and mother shrivel during her stints overseas, Huppert performs something like her own celebrity, a media construct devoid of innate value, without ever registering as a character.
As her husband, Gabriel Byrne gives one of the most nonexistent performances in the history of cinema. He's there, they're filming him, but he has nothing to exhibit but his aging flesh, which, having once been handsome, never became interesting, only thickened with age and success. I guess it's a measure of how bad the directing is, and the script, if we're left with nothing to contemplate but how honest Byrne is trying to convince us he is by never varying his expression except to widen his eyes. There's zero going on under the surface, he's made for TV.
This pair of narcissists are the parents of two young men who are making small messes of their lives. None of it really matters, since they all live in some kind of designer chalet surrounded by a forest that must be in Nyack, since that's where Isabelle's character, also named Isabelle, kills herself in a car accident a few years before the start of the "action." Not that there is any real action in this numb, close-lipped, listless film, except at minute 84 it did hit me, aha, this is a coming-of-age story about the younger son, who doesn't fit in at his high school. Devin Druid has the face of an underdone muffin with currants for eyes. Jesse Eisenberg plays his older, married brother, who comes home to avoid his wife and newborn.
In other words, it's Proust done badly. Director Joachim Trier is a 42-year-old Norwegian, the child of directors, related to Lars von Trier (who is many things but not boring), and grandson of Erik Lochen, Norway's answer to John Huston. In Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night, the set-up is not dissimilar: young son named Eugene, older brother a bit of a louse, father a pompous skinflint, and the mother absent by virtue of a heroin addiction. Except, of course, the Tyrones are personalities with flaws writ large, busy destroying and being destroyed. There's a reason they exist and we watch them.
There is no reason to watch Louder Than Bombs . If director Trier had an ounce of perspective or wit, he could have made this a stinging satire of an elite aesthete who runs away to Iraq or Syria to photograph the martyrs of American bombs, returning to awards and acclaim in New York City, before retiring to Nyack bored out of her mind. In the lineage of Ibsen and Bergman, he could have lanced some festering cultural wounds. There's something profoundly disgusting about these people's petty hypocrisies that Trier exposes but fails to explode. He's too polite and discreet. He's a bore. In cinema, that's an unforgivable sin.