This is a never less than interesting but a very uneven drama about the effect a mother has on her family. Isabelle Huppert plays Isabelle (mostly in flashback scenes), the wife of Gene (Gabriel Byrne), and the mother of Jonah (Jessie Eisenberg) and Conrad (Devin Druid). Killed in a car crash, a couple of years before most of the film is set, her death still is haunting those who have been left behind. The marriage was a troubled one but Gene has problems with moving-on in relationships with other women, and both sons idolised their mother, apparently at the expense of their father.
Director Joachim Trier gives us some telling and subtle scenes, particularly in the exchanges between Gene and Jonah. Jonah initially appears to be the most together character, but cracks in his marriage indicate otherwise. However, other parts of the film work much less well. Conrad’s brattish behaviour in most of the film doesn’t ring true, and Huppert doesn’t convince either in the role of the mother, or in her job of war photo-journalist. In fact, that profession seems such a cliché in a movie these days, we see plenty of shots of her stereotypical photos (women in burka holding guns for example) and it is a lazy way of signalling a character is going to have inner demons because of the atrocities they have seen.
However, the film is carried along by those great moments I mentioned: another is a simple sequence involving Conrad walking a girl, Melanie, home from a party. Their interaction is sweet and feels very real, with Ruby Jerins underlining the promise she showed in the TV series Nurse Jackie. Additionally, the performances of Byrne, Eisenberg (after some career missteps), and David Strathairn as Isabelle’s colleague and lover are all terrific.
Rating: 7 out of 10