The Slow Ascent Into Alcoholism
The pros and cons of the drinking life are explored in the movie “Another Round’
There are so many words in the English language for drunk: wasted, trashed, sloshed. But my favorite is probably ‘lit,’ because it perfectly describes that first swallow of liquor. It burns going down and ignites the senses.
And then some of us turn into full-on wildfires.
The four main characters in the new movie Another Round are middle-aged men who have lost their spark until one of them makes a modest proposal during a particularly dull 40th birthday dinner: they should drink during the day at their jobs as boring high school teachers.
It would be an experiment based on a Norweigan psychiatrist’s theory that humans perform optimally with a blood alcohol content of .05 percent. In the U.S., if your BAC is .08% you are considered legally impaired.
This would be a serious-minded study to see if regular doses of hooch would light up their gloomy lives.
The quartet agrees and starts brightening each morning with secret swallows of vodka. There are rules, at first, most notably no tippling after 8 PM, a habit of novelist and stable human being Ernest Hemmingway. The teachers hide bottles here and there and, at first, all their tensions and anxieties fade away.
They are all lit, like struck matches, especially star Mads Mikkelsen who starts to teach history with renewed passion and creativity. He also seems more engaged and alert with his family. It’s like a reverse magic trick where he suddenly makes himself reappear to his exhausted wife.
The experiment is obviously ill-conceived and doomed to fail as each man’s life starts to fall apart in small and big ways. Especially after they decided to increase their intake of booze. You know, for scientific purposes.
Eventually, the boys go on an absinthe-fueled bender, and any drinker will tell you that absinthe is goth tequila. It is a spirit that is literally a malevolent spirit. The night is a disaster.
The experiment’s outcomes were obvious from the get-go: getting bladdered every day is a recipe for pissing your pants. There is no shortcut to joy. A glass of wine can improve the taste of food and whiskey makes music more intense but there isn’t any inspiration at the bottom of a bottle. If you splash gasoline on a campfire you get a moment's warmth and a bright red whoosh and that’s all.
But some people only know how to make a window by smashing their heads against a wall until there’s a hole.
We all get old and tired, and no amount of booze can make you young again.
Mikkelsen, a soulful and graceful actor, and director Thomas Vinterberg, who snagged an Oscar for Another Round, keep this movie from becoming juvenile or maudlin. I hope Another Round is never remade in America because it will be a loud and obnoxious man-child comedy starring Will Ferrell and there will be a gratuitous vomit scene.
As it is, Another Round is intelligent and sophisticated, especially for a movie with a premise like “four men agree to get fucked up at work.” It is a gentle existential drama about civilized raging against the dying of the light. We all get old and tired, and no amount of booze can make you young again.
We are carefree once and even then we need alcohol to open up, to risk intimacy, to deal with uncertainties, and it’s easy to forget that to be a teenager is to dread the rest of your life.
Which is what Another Round is really about.
To be young is to have all of your mistakes ahead of you, and to be middle-aged is to count all the mistakes you made and to slowly realize you don’t have the time to correct them because the only thing ahead is death.
The saying “youth is wasted on the young” is a bitter observation. What, really, is so special about being young? For one, you’re not experienced and you depend on the wisdom of older people who clearly don’t know what they’re doing. In every season of life, human beings stumble around in the dark with their pants around their legs.
There’s a scene where one of the men encourages a student having an anxiety attack over a test to self-medicate with alcohol and there is the truth, briefly and boldly told, that no matter your age alcohol is the cheapest, most widely available, anti-anxiety coping mechanism. A tug on a bottle obliterates stress, for a moment. This kid will one day grow up to be a melancholy adult who will probably encourage a boy to drink away his fears, too.
Another Round has been nominated for International Feature Film, as well as Best Director, at this year’s Oscars. I have read some critics call the movie uplifting and moving and I just thought it was deeply sad, and not because I’ve been sober for ten years.
I thought the movie was sad because regret is inevitable. There is nothing you can do to change the past, and there is no elixir or spell, or lifehack that can undo what has been done. The best I can do is accept responsibility for the decisions I’ve made, for good or bad. I try to forgive a younger version of myself his excesses and blunders and I hope he can forgive me his future failures because there are so many.
I feel for Mikkelsen’s character because he has been clobbered by circumstance. He has no idea why his life is the way it is and the day drinking experiment is a sort of gentleman’s escape hatch to nowhere.
Believe me, I think about drinking and making it all go away. But I don’t. Not today, at least.
There was nothing in the movie that troubled or triggered me. The director very slyly finds creative ways to subtly visualize tipsiness, like brighter lighting and intimate close-ups for instance. In the early weeks of the experiment, drinking is fun. It’s naughty. It feels good to walk around a little drunk and euphoric. But you don’t have to tell anyone who has struggled with alcohol that guzzling beer and liquor is fun.
Of course, slamming shots is fun. Drinking is fun. Binge drinking is fun. It is fun until it isn’t.
Another Round isn’t particularly moralizing, which is refreshing. It also barely touches on the disease of alcoholism — one character meets a tragic end thanks to the booze but no one explicitly blames the drink. The movie is light on its feet without becoming a domestic melodrama.
The movie’s original title is Druk, which means ‘binge-drinking.’ The Danish title is more accurate because Another Round sounds like a sitcom about wisecracking barflies. The movie opens with students playing drinking games until they’re falling down drunk on public transportation and then the movie ends on another party, only this time the old men join, and for a brief moment they’re carefree and full of hope and a champagne-buzzed Mikkelsen performs a defiant Dionysian jazz dance in the street, weaving and jumping and spinning as the teens applaud, a triumphant improvisational floorshow that ends with him taking a literal leap of faith. For the first time in the movie, he is truly present.
It’s a very romantic ending.