'The Promised Land': There Will Be Hugs

Director Nikolaj Arcel’s new film starts strong before succumbing to sentimentality.

It’s almost too easy to read director and co-writer Nikolaj Arcel’s first Danish language film in over a decade, The Promised Land, as a thinly-veiled allegory about his misbegotten foray into the Hollywood studio system:

• Arcel, having worked his way up to the director of an international success (2012’s A Royal Affair) despite being outside the Hollywood system, tried to make the big leap into Hollywood; the protagonist of The Promised Land, Ludwig Kahlen, having worked his way up to the rank of captain in the military despite being the lowly unacknowledged bastard of a wealthy landowner, tries to make the big leap into the aristocracy (the movie’s original Danish title is Bastarden, which means exactly what you think it means).

• Arcel persuaded Sony to let him helm a big budget movie based on Stephen King’s beloved novel, The Dark Tower, which was widely believed to be unadaptable; Kahlen persuades the Royal Danish Court to allow him to attempt to settle the Jutland moors, a barren patch of land widely believed to be uninhabitable.

• Arcel is rumored to have run afoul of Tom Rothman, Chairperson of Sony Pictures Entertainment, who may have subsequently interfered with The Dark Tower; Kahlen runs afoul of Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), an aristocrat and magistrate with his own plans for the moors, who subsequently interferes with Kahlen’s mission.

The parallels all but smack you in the face.

Thing is, The Promised Land also feels like an audition for Hollywood to give Arcel a second chance. After a thrilling first half that portends a much meatier film than the one we end up getting, The Promised Land turns into a very boilerplate, albeit mostly well-executed, good guy/bad guy story, before finally succumbing to sentimentality in its final act. It’s sturdy, but it’s also slick and shallow and mindful to reassure the audience that the world is a good place, the kind of movie that will be loved by people who think Braveheart and Avatar are great cinema. I was vaguely surprised to find that it didn’t conclude with the contact information for Arcel’s agent.

But oh, that first half…!

Based on Ida Jessen’s novel The Captain and Ann Barbara, which was itself inspired by a true story, The Promised Land reunites Arcel with his A Royal Affair star, Mads Mikkelsen. Mikkselsen has mostly been typecast in American films as the heavy, and I completely understand why, but anyone who has seen his work in Thomas Vinterberg films like Another Round and The Hunt know he’s capable of so much more. Hard-working, ambitious, stubborn, principled, and emotionally distant, Kahlen is, initially at least, an incredible role, and Mikkelsen, a master of stoicism, speaks volumes even when he’s saying nothing at all. The earliest parts of the film are reminiscent of There Will Be Blood, and it’s not all that hard to imagine Kahlen’s journey ultimately being similar to the one undertaken by Daniel Plainview: Kahlen persistently engages in back-breaking manual labor despite a lack of resources and help, and protects his property with severe violence.

It is only after the introduction of De Schinkel that we understand Kahlen is driven by more than social-climbing greed; suddenly, we’re not watching There Will Be Blood, we’re watching The Verdict. Now we’re actively rooting for Kahlen, because we cannot help but admire that he is a man of ethics.

And yet, because the movie has been so grave thus far, the viewer may naturally assume that Kahlen is still on a collision course with tragedy; as he begins to accrue allies in his fight against De Schinkel, one gets the impression that those allies exist to be the rug pulled out from under Kahlen, as with Plainview’s “brother” (American goddamn treasure Kevin J. O'Connor) in There Will Be Blood.

What the audience has no way of knowing at this point is that De Schinkel is actually the first of the many straws which will eventually break the camel’s back. De Schinkel wastes little time reaching cartoonish levels of cretinous villainy, and in time, Kahlen’s moral wrinkles are ironed out as well, to the point where any hint of insensitivity or inner conflict feels perfunctory. Everything fits together so neatly that the movie forfeits its claim to reality (you will not be shocked to learn that the movie takes more than a few liberties with the non-fictional stories of Kahlen and De Schinkel). The explicit violence that seemed so shocking in the film’s first half now seems like sensationalist titillation.

Despite these flaws, I contend that The Promised Land would be at least 50% better if its final twenty minutes didn’t feel rushed. So desperate is the movie to leave us with some sense of warmth that it jumps ahead decades and then hastily wraps everything up, and with a message no more profound than “The real treasure was the friends we made along the way.” Aren’t you glad you traveled all this way for a fortune cookie?