Louder Than Bombs, an effectively somber family drama from Norwegian director Joachim Trier, is a work of fragmented portraiture. Threaded by secrets and weighted by grief, the film pointedly formalizes the emotional distance between a widowed father and his two sons, all of whom are struggling to balance personal dilemmas with profound loss. Their plots intersect intermittently; their journeys are in frequent parallel – but Trier neglects to narratively connect or strategically dramatize their stories. In that sense, Louder Than Bombs might have seemed in desperate search of catharsis, were it not a work of such sustained gravity.
The movie is experimental, taking you into the headspaces of its three primary characters: Gene, an actor-turned-teacher in a fling with his son’s English teacher, Hannah (Amy Ryan, wonderful in reuniting with Byrne post-In Treatment); Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg), Gene’s eldest, a newly-minted Sociology PhD conflicted in his new role as husband and father; and Conrad (Devin Druid), the youngest, an introverted high school freshman with a major crush on a pretty cheerleader. The boys are dealing with the loss of their mother (and Gene’s wife), Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a popular war-zone photographer whose death came years ago in a fatal car accident. We learn, quickly, that it was intentional – that, beyond their superficial circumstances, Gene is struggling to move on from the woman he couldn’t make happy; that Jonah is striving for the same balance of intellectual ambition and rigid domesticity that his mother could never achieve; and that Conrad, the only of the three not informed on the nature of his mother’s accident, is actively reaching for normalcy despite insurmountable confusion and pain.
In other words, Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt imbue each predicament with great emotional complexity; a tension runs through each character’s storyline, rooted in grief and cemented by the accompanying lack of closure. Louder Than Bombs runs with that sensation, completely disinterested in dramatic fluidity and instead consumed by the internal processes that come with loss, with remembrance and with moving on. At the film’s best, the aesthetic experience is remarkably raw – a foray into dreams and memories and nightmares that resonate with aching clarity. As Jonah heads home to help his father put together a retrospective on Isabelle's work, he finds himself remembering his mother as loving but detached, cool but “fragile.” With both of his children back home, Gene recalls the anger he’d express towards his wife, when she’d leave for months with no guarantee of return, fearing his children would grow up without a mother. And there’s Conrad, just trying to understand, or perhaps block-out, what’d happened: he’s in the dark, but he’s also trying to woo the cute girl at school.
The film’s craft is impeccable, both for its precision and its impact. The score, a devastating symphony of melancholy from Ola Flottum, progresses as the sensory guide. It lulls you in with seductive ease, but then entraps you, leaving you to instantaneously grapple with photographic impressions of grief and depression. That contention with such painful themes is less morose than expected, however: there’s always beauty to be found, in scenes laden with humor and love.
It helps that each character vignette is lengthy, with time to breathe and artistically extend. Early in the film, Trier traces in fragments the bloom of the doomed romance between Gene and Hannah, Conrad’s teacher – interspersed with Gene’s recollections of Isabelle, there emerges a tragedy to the lovely. Later, Conrad makes his way to a rowdy house party, in order to track down his first true love; as he simultaneously comes to terms with his mother’s true fate, the dalliance makes for a striking combination of childlike wonder and familial devastation. These arcs, particularly, don’t structurally flesh out as they’d ordinarily need to. Yet just in observing them, and in falling into their spiritual significance, they feel perfectly whole.
The key to success here is believability. There are devices that don’t always succeed – Trier occasionally marks the end of a vignette with too abrupt a cut-to-black; an early preference for time-shifting storytelling curiously disappears midway through – as well as a lack of narrative direction that isn’t fully compensated for by its (apparent) deliberateness. But Louder Than Bombs consistently gets right to the heart – its visual and aural flourishes sting with emotional immediacy, and reverberate with elongated, gut-wrenching aftershock. This is a film of tremendous ambiguity and implacable intent, but the shattered strands of memory and experience pieced together here are not meant to be solved or dissected. An excessively intellectual reading of Louder Than Bombs only blunts its impact, and unnecessarily cracks its tender foundation. Trier convincingly splices disparate parts together by sacrificing narrative logic for cinematic logic, an element increasingly rare in family drama film. Indeed, “family drama film” is becoming increasingly rare itself – as the genre migrates toward television, Louder Than Bombs provides a minor but potent reminder of the unique advantages that come with a bigger screen and a tighter timeframe.
There’s something genius about the casting, too, in regard to Trier’s lofty (and achieved) formal ambitions. With his polished Irish dialect, Byrne at first seems an unusual parent to Eisenberg, who’s known for playing fast-talking brainiacs like Mark Zuckerberg and David Lipsky; with the exceptionally careful Huppert and less-seasoned Druid in the mix, the family unit initially invokes disassembly. Isabelle’s physical distance and Gene’s figurative distance from the two boys are rendered near-interchangeable.
Yet there’s a power to this stilted interplay. The film’s maintenance of close perspectives keeps everyone around the in-focus character cipher-like, symbolic and restrained. Trier brilliantly plays off of his cool European sensibility – this is his first English-language film, and certainly his most intimate to date – because he creates what is, primarily in aesthetic terms, a deeply American family portrait. As the fissures heal through communication and acceptance – as the family, minus Isabelle, finally starts coming back together – the invocation is incredibly touching, if still mournful. Byrne, Eisenberg and the revelatory Druid are so good on their own that, once they start easing into each other’s rhythms, the family dynamic erupts with lively, joyful sadness. And therein lies the beguiling beauty of Louder Than Bombs. Like grief, it’s confounding and messy and a little detached – so clouded in sorrow, in fact, that you can only know what you feel in your heart.
Grade: A-