Revenge Is A Dish Best Served While Naked, Next To A Lake Of Lava

In ‘The Northman,’ one Viking gets even

My old man worked in politics, a grubby profession that attracts bluebloods and hustlers and nobodies who want to be somebody. My dad was the son of a Baptist preacher and he worked for a Texas Democrat born to great wealth.

He raised me to always take responsibility for my actions and to love one another, as Jesus commanded. I sat on his lap and he would tell me to never lie and to help those who ask for help and to be generous and gentle.

He had a long career because his boss trusted him: my dad was honest to a fault, which served him well on Capitol Hill up to a point. Politics is the art of saying “nice weather we’re having” with a smile while it rains. He never really talked to me about the powerful men he worked for, and with, many of them brilliant and insecure and ruthless.

But he did give me the following advice: don’t get mad, get even. This is not what Jesus would do, of course. There’s really no mention of revenge in The Gospels.

It is a saying that was popularized by Jack Kennedy, and my dad only mentioned it once, the summer before my first year of college. He was a funny and kind man but he wanted his son to know that revenge is an option. It may be the most toxic lesson he ever directly taught me and I wish he were alive so I could ask him if that was a difficult lesson to learn.

In my own modest career, I have been stabbed in the back and the front, and once, I was asked for a reference and I told them the person they were trying to hire was a monster. That person had once tried to screw me over and I got even.

Was that petty? Yes. Passive-aggressive? Oh, for sure. Necessary? Probably not, it had been years since I had seen him and we were both living our lives but then I had a small opportunity to fuck him over and I did. Imagine if I was somebody though.

Power is corrupting because revenge feels so good.

Director Robert Egger’s newest movie is about fathers and sons and revenge. In The Northman, a Viking prince is obsessed with killing his uncle for the murder of his father, the king.

The 38-year-old filmmaker’s first two movies — 2015’s The Witch and 2019’s The Lighthouse — are, partly, stories about madness. A 17th-century family is torn apart and driven insane by religious hysteria in The Witch and, in The Lighthouse, a pair of men lose their minds on a remote rock in the middle of the sea in the late 1890s.

Both of these period movies are moody and claustrophobic and feverish. Eggers is not interested in modernity’s neuroses, preferring to explore muddier, more superstitious, and brutish, times as if yesterday was more honest than today. The characters in The Witch and The Lighthouse are all trapped in pasts when the natural and supernatural worlds were stronger, more formidable, than humanity and civilization.

The Northman is more straightforward than Eggers’ previous works — it is a historical action movie — but it’s also about madness, in a way.

Alexander Skarsgård stars as Amleth, a Scandanavian cross between Hamlet and Conan the Barbarian, who is consumed by revenge. Like Shakespeare’s Dane, he is eventually driven insane by his lust for vengeance.

From the moment he watches his father get beheaded by his own blood he lives his life according to one motto: I will avenge you, father! I will save you, mother! I will kill you, Fjölnir!

Amleth does not get mad, he gets even.

The movie is bloody and relentless and a little overlong. The opening chapters, including a Viking berserker raid on a village that reveals these raiders as merciless slavers who burn women and children alive, are gripping, to say the least, and the climax is a heavy metal hallucination: two ripped dudes in the buff trying to kill each other as a volcano spews forth red-hot magma.

But Amleth’s revenge plot is less pulse-pounding. First, he impersonates a slave and then gets himself sold to his uncle, who was kicked off the throne he stole by a rival, and then there’s the last part, which you already know. Avenge, save, kill. These scenes drag, save for a thrilling fight with the undead in a moonlight-filled tomb and a vicious game of what can only be called “murder lacrosse.” (It is not surprising that Amleth is a Thor loser. That’s a little Norse humor.)

Amleth is single-minded — revenge, revenge, revenge! — but he also has a sadistic streak and doesn’t go for his uncle’s throat right away. If he had, then The Northman would have been half an hour shorter than its two-hour and seventeen-minute running time. The good news is, I suppose, whenever The Northman’s narrative momentum slows there’s a sudden dismemberment of some kind to perk up fans of carnage.

I’m not a Viking historian, but the amount of detail in Eggers’ film suggests painstaking research. The Norway and Iceland of 895 AD feel vibrant and lived in. There are right-wingers and self-professed white supremacists who romanticize Vikings and imagine a glorious bygone era of brave white dudes with horned hats sailing and plundering but Eggers isn’t so sure that’s the truth.

The Vikings in The Northman live short, violent, filthy lives. The prospect of being hacked to pieces was so prevalent the Vikings invented an afterlife that rewarded death during battle. To be a Viking is to yearn to be carried to Valhalla by a Valkyrie and the only way for that to happen is to die horribly, maybe with an ax to the face or a sword to the gut. I just don’t think that era was the peak of anything.

I don’t understand how anyone can want to live at any time other than this one. For thousands and thousands of years, humans believed in prophecies and huddled around fires terrified of spirits living in the shadows. The line between animal and man was more permeable and I like the year 2022 just fine. There are antibiotics. I believe in self-help books and N95 masks and I hunch over my smartphone terrified of what lurks in the replies and comments on social media.

This is besides the point because the worldbuilding in The Northman is transporting and one of the stars of the movie, right after Skarsgård. He’s usually a quirky but handsome character actor but he carries this movie on his powerful shoulders. His Amleth is savage and sensitive, a lumbering hulk who barely understands the emotions boiling inside him. Skarsgård is captivating, either alone or when sharing the screen with his first-class co-stars.

Eggers reunites with his breakthrough star from The Witch, Anya Taylor-Joy, who gives her all to a so-so role. As a Russian slave and romantic interest, Taylor-Joy exists to soothe Skarsgård’s beast.

At first, Nicole Kidman seems wasted as Amleth’s long-suffering mother (Skarsgård and Kidman played husband and wife in the 2017 HBO murder mystery Big Little Lies.) But Kidman is given a third-act monologue that is a real stunner, and possibly the best non-mayhem-centered performance in the movie. As Amleth’s papa, Hawke is a gentle heathen and Willem Dafoe is maximum Willem Dafoe as a jester/shaman who warns Amleth, as all the best jesters/shamans do. There isn’t enough of popstar Björk as a goth soothsayer with a loom.

Danish actor Claes Bang is excellent as Fjölnir the Brotherless, a man who maybe doesn’t deserve the justice Amleth hungers to mete out.

The main theme of The Northman is revenge. Without it, Amleth has no purpose or identity and when he’s finally given a choice between love and children or trying to decapitate an old man who doesn’t even remember his nephew, he chooses the latter. Revenge feels good, like scratching an infected wound that will never heal.