After a botched stint in the Hollywood big leagues with The Dark Tower, Danish director Nikolaj Arcel is back on home turf with The Promised Land, a sturdy, stately period drama far more in line with his opulent breakthrough hit A Royal Affair. Putting stalwart Mads Mikkelsen to work as a complicated leading man yields some reliably excellent crop, and off the back of his similarly patchy involvement in the final nail in the Indiana Jones coffin, it’s also a pleasure to see the great Dane return home and grapple with the type of compelling material that made him an international star in the first place.
The Promised Land a story hewn out of history and fiction (a direct adaptation of Ida Jessen’s The Captain and Ann Barbara) that casting light on a lesser-known (but no less fascinating) chapter of explosive European history, following Mikkelsen as Captain Ludwig Kahlen, a low-born soldier who has worked his way up the ranks and to a small pension that he wants to direct towards cultivating land in the most inhospitable regions of his country: the Jutland heath. He approaches the king with a wild proposition: if he is able to turn the soil fertile, he asks for a title, estate and servants in return. The royal house laughingly agrees to the deal, sending him packing to the bleak region suspecting the task to be futile. But when his combination of steely determination and shrewd farming tactics bears surprising results, heads are turned with great interest towards the grumpy old man, drawing unwanted attention from bandits and a hissably evil local landowner by the name of de Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg).
There’s plenty of meat to chew on with Kahlen and his place in the world, and while his moral quandaries often have predictable answers, there’s no stone left unturned in exploring his story to its fullest extent.
Like its dogged protagonist, The Promised Land wastes no time in getting down to business. Some quick context given by on-screen text and an arrestingly blunt introduction to Kahlen is enough to get this film off to the races, and the furious pace is kept up long into the third act. It’s epic in scope in a refreshing way, throwing in some pleasant highs and brutal lows with its melodrama that grows and grows as the years pass. A cast of colourful characters muscles in to keep the work going, headed up by Amanda Collin’s world-weary maid Ann Barbara and child actor Melina Hagberg’s sparky outcast Anmai Mus. As circumstance draws its leads together into a close-knit family, the heart of the drama beats hard and fast, shifting the focus away from the great feat of creating civilisation in an uncivilised land and settling on a warm, empathetic tale of care and concession. Although the emotional texture of the film becomes more broad as time goes by, it would be difficult to pick fault with such a strong crowd-pleasing story buried within a film that markets itself on the grit of its landscape and its leading man.
The Promised Land is only the film’s English-language title, however, and in its native Denmark, it boldly announces itself as BASTARDEN (The Bastard). It’s entirely possible that non-Danish audiences will be keyed into the film through its vision of a people finding their place in the world, rather than the original title which refers quite bluntly to Kahlen himself. Despite literally being born out of wedlock and cast aside by the world, Mikkelsen’s Kahlen exudes a pent-up bitterness that defines ‘bastard’ in a far more offensive way. A bastard, then, in every sense of the word, he’s a compelling one at that, gradually having his edges sanded off as the winds crack off his razor-sharp cheekbones and the seasons pass. Yet perhaps more interestingly, it’s possible that BASTARDEN relates to the heath itself, an immense stretch of land that is owned by no one legitimately that is also a real bastard to cultivate. There’s plenty of meat to chew on with Kahlen and his place in the world, and while his moral quandaries often have predictable answers, there’s no stone left unturned in exploring his story to its fullest extent.
Where the terrain gets rocky is in the third act. As tensions rise and blood is spilled, de Schinkel’s villainy is presented in borderline cartoonish acts of sadism, epitomised by his almost-Nietzschean belief that the entire world is chaos. There’s nothing especially wrong with the tone being stretched like this, but when the film starts with such a confidently murky morality at its centre, its eventual commitment to good vs. evil feels a little disappointing. Still, The Promised Land remains as solid a period tale as any territory can offer, and marks a return to fine form from Arcel, a filmmaker with robust vision and impressive scope who is obviously keen to make his own mark in Danish cinema.
The Promised Land is in UK cinemas from 16th Feb
Simon’s Archive – The Promised Land
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