Review: 'Sentimental Value' puts two great actors, Stellan Skarsgard and Renate Reinsve, in a wrenching tale of love, loss and art
The Norwegian-set drama “Sentimental Value” raises two questions that movie critics ask at this time of year, as the award-season talk overrides all other thought: Is Stellan Skarsgard one of the greatest actors of our lifetime? And is whether Renate Reinsve and Joachim Trier, who collaborated before this on “The Worst Person in the World,” the greatest actor-director combo since DeNiro and Scorsese?
And because these questions come up in a movie where Skarsgard and Reinsve play a father and daughter both united and divided by their art, the answers become secondary to the sheer enjoyment of actors sparking off each other creatively.
Trier, writing with frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt, starts by introducing us to Nora Borg, Reinsve’s character, an Oslo stage actor who’s introduced to us while she’s having a massive case of stage fright just as the curtain goes up on her new production. When Nora finally goes onstage, she’s brilliant — but one wonders what all the anxiety is doing to her.
Trier then shows Nora in the family house — the place where she and her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), grew up listening to their parents argue. On this day, though, the house is filled with mourners, after the funeral of their mother, who died after a long battle with cancer. And in the door walks Gustav (Skarsgard), Nora and Agnes’ father.
While visiting, Gustav tells Nora he has something he wants to ask. Gustav, a famous movie director, has a new script, and he thinks Nora would be perfect in the lead role. Nora — whose screen work is apparently limited to a run on a popular Norwegian TV series — has never worked with her father before, and tells him she doesn’t want to start now.
Gustav then flies to Deauville, France, for a career retrospective tribute — including the screening of a movie that starred Agnes when she was 8 years old. One of his admirers at the festival is Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), a famous American actor who declares she’s willing to cancel her previous commitments to make a movie with Gustav.
Almost immediately, Gustav is back in Oslo, with Rachel in tow. Gustav has sacrificed some of his artistic vision to make his movie with Rachel, including changing it to English and signing a production deal with Netflix. But Gustav plans to shoot his movie in the old family home — if Agnes, who lives there now with her husband, Even (Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud), and their son Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven), approves the shoot. Nora, back at work at the theater, starts to wonder if she made the right choice by refusing the role.
Trier’s approach seems simple — put any combination of Skarsgard, Reinsve and Lilleaas in a scene together, and the drama will take care of itself. Of course, it’s never that simple, but Trier is sharp enough to create the space for such magic moments, and trust that his extraordinary cast will find them, which they do.
People who know Skarsgard only from his big-budget Hollywood movies, like in “Dune” or “The Avengers,” should watch him here and be transformed by his fully inhabited performance as a filmmaker who knows what he’s given up to make his movies — but he knows he can’t stop himself.
Skarsgard is perfectly matched in Lilleaas as the caregiver who chose family over art, and particularly Reinsve as the daughter who, in a sense, had her father’s choice thrust upon her. It’s an emotional contrast, and both Lilleaas and Reinsve spar with Skarsgard to talk about love, loss and the impossibility of capturing all of it on film.
Trier does capture something — a story of regret and a late-in-life chance to prove oneself. And it captures the little cracks in a life and what it takes for a family to find them or even acknowledge them.
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‘Sentimental Value’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, November 21, in theaters. Rated R for some language including a sexual reference, and brief nudity. Running time: 133 minutes; in English, Norwegian and French, with subtitles.