Movie Reaction: The Worst Person in the World

Formula: (La La Land – the music) ^ Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

 

I’ve enjoyed the motion picture academy accepting foreign movies more broadly in recent years. Parasite won Best Picture. Roma lost in a real horse race. Cold War. Minari (kind of). It’s cool how the language barrier matters less and less to the point where both Drive My Car and The Worst Person in the World can ride critical waves to major nominations without even requiring major studio pushes. It certainly helps me get my foreign movie count up and it helps to redefine what an Oscar movie is.

 

What’s funny is that The Worst Person in the World is traditional Oscar bait in a way, just in another language. It’s the story of a directionless young woman named Julie. After excelling at school but never settling on a career, she works in a bookstore with no specific plan. We then follow her through relationships over years and see where she ends up. The film is broken into 12 chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue. It’s a tidy narrative device that highlights the screenplay and structure. Some chapters are short, funny tales. Others are major events. Some morph into something surreal. It gives the movie a lot of variety, allowing for director Joachim Trier to really show off. The chapters also give the movie more of a sense of pace than it would have had otherwise.

 

The lead actress, Renate Reinsve is just lovely. I’d say that if this was in English, she’d surely have an Oscar nomination, but then I remember Greta Gerwig never got any acting nominations. They have a similar energy where you want to root for her no matter what. The main two love interests, Anders Danielsen Lie and Herbert Nordrum, are good too. Both wear their flaws without being defined by them. It’s mostly Reinsve carrying the movie. I’m very excited to see what American project she inevitably gets brought into. Or, I guess I could take the onus off her and find her other Norwegian films.

 

This movie is perhaps a case of unfairly heightened expectations. This is one of the favorites of critics and podcasts I absorbed for last year. I didn’t know what to expect from the movie, but I knew I was supposed to love it. Instead, I’m only at “really like”. The chapter structure had the unintended impact of turning into a countdown for me rather than a marker. There are some breathtaking scenes, like the time stop one used for the marketing, and it’s slyly funnier than it lets on. What it ultimately builds to is a tad underwhelming. Still worth seeing. I’m a sucker for any kind of coming-of-age story, even if it’s tied to an arrested development story.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

 

After the Credits

No need to be coy anymore. The end of this movie is the kind of thing that creatives and Hollywood types eat up. After these relationships, Julie realizes her path is to be a photographer on a movie set rather than settle down with a family. That goes a step too close to pandering for me. Something about her working on a movie set shows a lack of creativity. I think the endgame of the movie is that she can choose a path different than the motherhood and relationship path she’s on. That much is satisfying. Having her work on a movie set feels like the filmmaker justifying their own path rather than Julie’s. Or maybe I’m annoyed by the notion one must sacrifice a family for a successful career. I’m reading a lot into this, I know. It was such an abrupt message shift to me. Perhaps it won’t seem so clunky or transparent upon a rewatch, but it really took me out of the movie.