Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland feels like a 70s Werner Herzog movie -specifically Aguirre, the Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo. The arrogance of man endeavoring to conquer foreboding nature only for it to destroy him. It’s a great story, and Herzog is perhaps its greatest teller. But Pálmason doesn’t employ the same momentum as Herzog -indeed some of his stillness puts one in mind more of Bergman or Tarkovsky. Though his particular hatred of his own protagonist seems to be entirely his own. Where someone like Herzog was fascinated by Aguirre, Pálmason loathes his hero and delights in the cruelty he inflicts on him in vengeance for his casual colonialism.
The movie claims to be inspired by real artifacts found in southeast Iceland -wet plate photographs dating from the late nineteenth century taken by a Danish priest establishing a remote church. But in Coen-fashion, it is a fiction -though a plausible one that motivated Pálmason in his filmmaking. However he came to the premise, it is a good one. A Danish Lutheran priest called Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) is charged with building a church in a remote area of Iceland -then part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Inspired by the import of his task, he takes along a camera to document the mission and the environment, and sets out on a more elaborate trajectory than is entirely necessary so as to experience the apparent beauty of the land, to bask in God’s wonder essentially. Though he does this unfamiliar with the terrain and without any education in the Icelandic language exclusively spoken by most of his travelling companions -and yet he remains stubbornly insistent on certain aspects of the journey, such as taking those photographs. You can see where problems may arise.
Despite the harsh conditions of the journey, Pálmason has nothing but reverence for the natural beauty of Iceland, and in fact makes the argument quite well against it being touched by the kind of civilization Lucas brings. In fact throughout the movie he drops evocative images that are also visual jokes contrasting Lucas against his surroundings. Setting up his nineteenth century camera in the middle of the tundra for instance. The elements raining down on him are mildly uncomfortable at first, but they become more of a nuisance as the journey goes on, before outright mocking him. His guide Ragnar (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson), with whom exists that language barrier, is deeply offended by him -being a man who more honestly respects the land, without religious prerequisite, and lives by it in a way Lucas is woefully incapable of. He also just hates these colonialist Danes. Their conflict, in which one is clearly unaware of how deep it is, is one of the movie’s most engaging signatures.
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We’ve seen movies about devout Christians challenged in harsh environments. Both Roland Joffe’s The Mission and Martin Scorsese’s Silence are exceptional examples. But while in those movies you got the sense of the filmmakers seriously contending with the human side of this toll, inviting the audience to relate with the character’s pain, here the approach decidedly comes from the natural place, Pálmason seemingly encouraging his audience to root against this buffoonish missionary. Like that evangelical man a few years ago breaking several laws to spread Christianity to an isolated indigenous tribe and getting killed for it, there’s a catharsis to some of the misfortune that befalls Lucas, especially given the danger he puts his crew in and the loss partway into the journey of his one translator. His attitude is quite abrasive too -seen especially once he reaches the parish, having had to be carried the last way on a stretcher due to his exhaustion; he refuses to preach or partake in any clerical duties until the church building is completed, and is condescending towards local customs. Through this, the movie doesn’t let up on either his obtuseness or its own foul treatment of him.
Hove gives a very good performance of a character intended not to have much of an inner life and a minimized personality. There is a pitiable quality he plays with some pathos, whether in his desperation to God after a time to send him back to Denmark, or his subtle sexual frustration with his own attraction to Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne) the elder daughter of his host. His frustration with his situation just in general, and how far afield it veers from his ideal wonderfully bubbles under the surface of his piety through much of the movie, until it can no longer be constrained in a genuinely shocking moment of violence late in the film.
It all ends in a very stark place for Lucas, as had been the case for his cinematic predecessors, daring to invade in unearned confidence a space not meant for them. And it is one last punchline in the great dark joke this world plays on the anxious man of God. Such an archetypal story deserves a retelling, and Pálmason more than adequately completed the task with his hubristic epic that does legitimately feel ripped from another time. After all that work and suffering, the photographs remain -perhaps the one good idea Lucas had, though he could not have understood its true value of preservation. You really wish the story was true. But I suppose it is in a way, isn’t it?
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This holiday season, how about spend some time with the royal family at their most dysfunctional? The middle chapter of Pablo LarraÃn’s trilogy on important women of the twentieth century -and one that I think is better than the first, Jackie- Spencer is an empathetic and intense look at the world of Diana Spencer in the midst of her tumultuous divorce and mental health issues over a Sandringham Christmas in the early 1990s. Kristen Stewart stars in one of her best performances as the deeply troubled princess dealing with the harrowing and claustrophobic atmosphere of the royal institution trying to control her every move to salvage their reputational P.R. -an unflattering but fair portrait of the Royal Family to be sure. LarraÃn venerates Diana, but doesn’t put her on a pedestal, as he crafts these psychological episodes where she envisions herself as Anne Boleyn and against the greater tide of history -we see her as a woman thrust into extraordinary and deeply unenviable circumstances whose one true outlet of love and pride are her sons. Shot with immense precision that puts the audience in her perspective, and a nostalgic golden sheen that evokes both the holiday and the tinted aesthetic of the era, it is a tremendous profile, one that will only look better the more irrelevant the British crown will inevitably become.
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