If Wes Anderson directed a remake of Fargo, it might look a little like The Middle Man, the latest elegantly composed tragicomedy from Norwegian writer-director Bent Hamer. Filmed in Canada and Germany but set in a slightly out-of-time, off-the-map Middle America, this quirky literary adaptation is rich in gentle charm and visual brio, even if it touches on dark places that sit uneasily with its director’s usual brand of warm-hearted absurdism. Although Hamer shares a downbeat sense of Scandi-gloom humour with Sweden’s Roy Andersson and Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki, his films are typically sweeter, lighter affairs.
The English-speaking cast of this multinational co-production are mostly Norwegians, Swedes and Canadians. Hamer has worked in English before, with Matt Dillon on the wry Charles Bukowski adaptation Factotum (2005), but he generally favours his native tongue. Fresh from its festival world premiere in Toronto, The Middle Man opens domestically this week. Northern European audiences will embrace its understated glumness and droll ironies. while Hamer’s track record and rare detour into English dialogue should help open doors in overseas markets. His last feature, 1001 Grams (2014), was chosen as Norway’s official Oscar submission.
The setting is Karmack, a forlorn fictional ghost town crumbling away in some lonely corner of heartland USA. Pål Sverre Hagen gives an alert, twitchy performance as Frank, a glum man-child with limited prospects who still lives with his long-suffering mother (Nina Andresen Borud). But Frank’s fortunes improve markedly when the city council hire him as their new “middle man”, a unenviable role that involves calmly breaking bad news to next of kin after Karmack suffers yet another of its suspiciously regular fatal accidents. The position brings Frank a sharp new suit, a shabby office with paint-peeling walls, and a self-important swagger that soon starts to fade after a rare couple of weeks in which nobody dies. “I don’t want to be out of a job just because people were lucky for a few days,” he frets.
But Frank need not worry. When his newly elevated status leads him into a tentative romance with City Hall receptionist Brenda (Tuva Novotny), it comes as a double blow to boozy hothead Bob (Trond Fausa Aurvåg), who is both a failed contender for the middle man job and Brenda’s embittered ex. Tensions between the pair spiral out of control during a comically petty stand-off between Bob and Frank’s best friend Steve (Rossif Sutherland, son of Donald), which concludes with a tragic burst of random violence. These events plunge Frank into a series of tough moral dilemmas as he finds himself facing life or death decisions, mishandles a macabre case of mistaken identity involving two teenage girls, then becomes implausibly entangled in a messy amateur murder plot.
While its twisty narrative is consistently engaging, The Middle Man never fully resolves all its plot threads into a satisfying whole – particularly in its meandering final act, which contains teasingly vague hints that Frank may be a sociopath with a violent past stretching back to childhood. This backstory is never explored, and Frank’s true motivations remains frustratingly opaque. This gap in context may be explained by Hamer’s selective screenplay, which adapts only part of a novel, the mid-section of Lars Saabye Christensen’s 2012 triptych Snuk. Hardly fatal flaws, but these omissions weaken a film that fails to answer its own philosophical questions about guilt, grief and the nature of accidents.
The Middle Man is vintage Hamer in its eccentric backwater setting, dry humour and minor-key emotions, though the tone is a little bleaker here than usual. Superb art direction, precisely poised camerawork and artfully retro colour-coordinated visuals are also Hamer hallmarks. The lakeside town of Sault Ste Marie in northwest Ontario stands in for Karmack, its grungy back streets and ramshackle wooden houses given a handsome makeover with a vintage palette of pastel blues and warm earthtones, often bathed in a golden sunny haze.
The mostly Nordic leads put an agreeably off-kilter Scandi twist on small-town Americana, with strong support from a rich background chorus of seasoned Canadian screen talent including writer-director Don McKellar, former Tales of the City star Paul Gross and grizzled Twin Peaks veteran Kenneth Welsh. The only real jarring choice here is Jonathan Goldsmith’s score, whose incongruously cloying sentimentality is ill-suited to Hamer’s bittersweet restraint. Pre-existing song choices serve the drama better, notably Norwegian torch singer Ane Brun’s impassioned take on Radiohead’s desolate ballad How To Disappear Completely, which lends the ostensibly uplifting finale an afterglow of eerie melancholy. The Middle Man offers plenty of classy polish and quirky charm, even if it never quite explores its own dark depths.
Director: Bent Hamer
Screenplay: Bent Hamer, from the novel Snuk by Lars Saabye Christensen
Cast: Pål Sverre Hagen, Tuva Novotny, Paul Gross, Nina Andresen Borud, Don McKellar, Rossif Sutherland, Nicolas Bro, Kenneth Welsh, Trond Fausa Aurvåg, Aksel Hennie
Producers: Bent Hamer, Simone Urdl, Reinhard Brundig, Jamie Manning, Jennifer Weiss, Nina Frese, Jacob Jarek
Cinematography: John Christian Rosenlund
Editing: Anders Refn
Production design: Diana Magnus
Music: Jonathan Goldsmith
Production companies: BulBul Film (Norway), The Film Farm (Canada), Pandora Film (Germany), Profile Pictures (Denmark), Bord Cadre Films Sarl (Switzerland), Sovereign Films (UK)
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations)
World sales: The Match Factory, Cologne
In English
95 minutes
