‘Aberdeen’: A Volatile Story of Renewal

Hans Petter Moland’s compelling “Aberdeen” stars Lena Headey as an ambitious young attorney whose life unexpectedly starts unraveling at the very moment she has received an important promotion from her large London firm. Her mother, Helen (Charlotte Rampling), who lives in Aberdeen, Scotland, and to whom Kaisa is not close, has asked her to travel to Norway and bring back her father, Tomas (Stellan Skarsgard).

Helen has just been diagnosed with advanced terminal cancer, and she wants to die happy by marrying Tomas, who walked out on her and Kaisa 15 years earlier. Those who are children of alcoholics know that Kaisa is courting disaster in trying to deal with a father who not only is a drunk but also has not seen or heard from her since he departed. At least she has his Oslo address.

Kaisa has told herself that she can deliver her father to her mother in the space of a day. She is sufficiently assertive that Tomas, a continual drinker and smoker, agrees reluctantly to accompany her but is so falling-down drunk that he is not allowed to board the plane to Scotland. Kaisa thereupon rents a car for the 450-mile drive back, and their adventure begins.

Moland piles on the plot developments so thickly that for much of its duration “Aberdeen” has an aura of contrivance that threatens to be unshakable but ultimately is overcome by the strength of his material, the depth of his characterizations and ultimately his powerhouse of a cast that includes Ian Hart as Clive, a levelheaded, plain-talking truck driver. His act of roadside kindness enmeshes him in the volatile atmosphere created by father and daughter, whom he declares are both “afraid to be real”--afraid of their emotions. By the time father and daughter come to the end of their catastrophic journey, they have discovered the meaning of self-sacrifice and the need for redemption. But, with all the setbacks along the way, will they reach Helen’s bedside before it’s too late?

One of the film’s key strengths is that Kaisa is drawn as a classic child of an alcoholic, a driven workaholic with a fear of intimacy and a vulnerability to substance abuse herself. As enraging and disgusting as Tomas’ behavior can be, he is still capable of being shrewd and funny. (Not surprisingly, Moland grew up with an alcoholic father.) Rampling’s enduringly beautiful Helen has reason to have regrets she wants to resolve. “Aberdeen” reunites Skarsgard with Moland, who directed him in the equally compelling “Zero Kelvin,” in which Skarsgard played a Greenland fur-trapper, a brutal, caustic man enduring a terrible secret. It also reunites Skarsgard and Rampling, memorably teamed in the extraordinary “Signs and Wonders.”

All told, “Aberdeen” is a raw, harrowing film with a streak of dark, sometimes rowdy humor, enhanced strongly by cinematographer Philip Ogaard’s gritty, bold camerawork and Zbigniew Preisner’s stately score. It could have done with fewer plot devices, but it is ultimately far more satisfying than countless less ambitious and risky films.

*

Unrated. Times guidelines: much drunkenness, some drug-taking, violence, language, and strong adult themes and situations.

‘Aberdeen’

Lena Headey: Kaisa

Stellan Skarsgard: Tomas

Ian Hart: Clive

Charlotte Rampling: Helen

A First Run Features release of a Norsk Film production in association with Freeway Films. Director Hans Petter Moland. Producers Tom Remlov, Petter J. Borgli. Screenplay by Moland, Kristin Amundsen; from a story by Moland and Lars Bill Lundholm. Cinematographer Philip Ogaard. Editor Sophie Hesselberg. Music Zbigniew Preisner. Costumes Anne Pederson. Production designer Janusz Sosnowski. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes.

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