In a Better World

Sony Pictures Classics | Release Date: April 1, 2011

7.8	USER SCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 51 Ratings

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TVJerryMay 1, 2011

One of the recurring themes on this season's "Glee" has been bullying. In this Oscar winner (Best Foreign Film), the Danes tackle the subjectâ

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ShiiraMay 15, 2011

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Jorgen Lennart Hannson(Rolf Lassgard) is a man accustomed to getting his own way, and in "Efter bryllupet", the business magnate can hardly believe his own ears when Jacob Pedersen(Mads Mikkelsen), a Danish-expatriate who runs a cash-strapped orphanage in India, initially refuses to abide by the wish of a dying man. "Do I have to live on the other side of the world to get your help?" cries Jorgen, beseeching the good samaritan to remain in Denmark, so he can look after the billionaire's family, which includes Jacob's just-married biological daughter Ida, the all-too-human end-result of a pregnancy that Helene had kept hidden for twenty years from her former lover. This filmmaker, collaborating with the same screenwriter on all of her projects to date, seems to be preoccupied with humanitarians and how their working abroad effects the people they leave behind on the homefront, as a byproduct to her primary interest, which is the discomfiture that exists between a good person's ideals and the natural forces of reality. In "Broden", a soldier affiliated with the International Security Assistance Force(an organization designed to keep the peace in Afghanistan), is assigned the job of protecting Kabul from the Taliban, and in the process, risks the possibility of never seeing the people who truly need him for non-cooperating Muslims resentful of any outside intervention. Time and time again, the filmmaker shows the inherent paradox in humanitarianism, by which making needy third world denizens the altruistic person's first priority is in fact, a sort of selfishness, because the public-spirited person makes himself inaccessible to loved ones. Jacob is more concerned with the welfare of an Indian boy, Pramod, than his own child, who's about to lose the only father she has ever known. And here, in the filmmaker's latest, "Haeven", the same question posed to Jacob is asked by the moviegoer, when Elias(Markus Rygaard), seeking advice via the Internet, doesn't receive any potential life-saving guidance from his absentee father(Mikael Peresbrandt), a doctor in Sudan, on the eve of a potential tragedy, due to a bad connection. Despite being a Lars Von Trier protege(her "Elsker dig for evigt" was a Dogme film), this filmmaker is no emotional sadist, but emotions do run high in her somewhat overwrought melodramas. Regardless of her humanity, like Von Trier, she does, nevertheless, punish her protagonists to a certain extent, but comparatively speaking, it's a slap on the wrist compared to what her mentor puts his characters through. Although Elias faces life-threatening injuries from a successful bomb, the boy recuperates, sparing Anton, whom the film chastises for straying from his non-violent belief system, from further irrevocable consequences. Previously, back in Denmark, the Swedish doctor had refused to be goaded into fistacuffs with a racist mechanic, choosing instead to absorb slap after slap in the Dane's garage as a lesson in turning the other cheek(a teaching from the Bible), for the benefit of Elias and his pointedly named friend Christian(William Johnk Nielsen). Soon after returning to Sudan, Anton's pacifism gets a major test, when his refugee camp is visited by a notorious warlord seeking treatment for a badly mutilated leg. Practicing what he preaches, the principled doctor takes him on as a patient, even though the autocrat has a long-standing history of violence against pregnant women. Jesus' teachings, however, are lessons in impotence , Anton soon comes to realize, and allows for a retributive mob to descend on the African boss, which for the doctor, is a personal(and professional) sin. Unlike Selma(Bjork), who in Von Trier's "Dancer in the Dark", is sentenced to hang after bashing her neighbor's head with a safe deposit box, this compassionate filmmaker doesn't carry out the fundamentalist principalities of "an eye for an eye" to its final solution. As a result, Elias wakes up from his coma, which for some cineasts, is a denouement better suited for Hollywood than the art house, and moreover, "Haeven" grants Anton the opportunity to rescind his near-fatal transgression away in its totality, when he thwarts Christian's suicide attempt from atop a silo. Similarly, in "Broden", there's no corresponding death for the comrade-in-arms that Michael(Ulrich Thomsen) murders in Afghanistan, even though the filmmaker broaches the irony of a peacekeeper who can't even keep the peace in a domestic situation. For a film steeped in biblical subtext("thou shalt not covet thy [brother's] wife"), a Cain and Abel-like ending would only be suitable, but the filmmaker never fully embraces the intactness of tragedy like Von Trier and another Dogme alumnus, Thomas Vinterberg. She has a weakness for the happy ending. "In a Better World" is yet another taut melodrama that holds back the tears, but still I love Susanne Bier, a beautiful filmmaker with smarts and integrity.… Expand

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xolveJun 29, 2014

As a film concerned only with it's subjects this work succeeds - an artful, touching account of violence, consequences and mulling-over of the philosophy therein.
However, I feel as a social commentary, or the 'critique of masculinity' thatAs a film concerned only with it's subjects this work succeeds - an artful, touching account of violence, consequences and mulling-over of the philosophy therein.
However, I feel as a social commentary, or the 'critique of masculinity' that the blurb expouses, it fails. It deals too much with the polar extremes of violence and passivity, and not enough with the bold-faced positives of masculinity such as creating positive firm boundaries, and being able to defend oneself without succumbing entirely to anger and aggression.
The social chord seems to be saying that 'either you fight back and become an aggressor yourself, or you are passive, or you are a woman and you suffer the effects of masculinity'. Nothing could be more 2-dimensional or further from the truth. And in a world where woman are, by and large, attracted to dominant, powerful men who do not overtly display emotion, and where men are compelled from birth to meet that expectation as best they can and suppress their emotions, it comes across as compelling, but unfair.… Expand

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