Content warning: this piece contains discussions of substance abuse, specifically alcoholism.
I first became aware that my grandfather drank more than most people when I was maybe 11 years old. It was my dad’s 40th birthday party. It was getting late and the party was still blazing on, so my grandfather and grandmother walked my younger brother and I home. More accurately, my grandmother walked my brother and I home – my grandfather was so drunk we dropped him off at their house on the way. I was delivered home safely, but spent the night paralysed by one specific fear: I was convinced that grandpa was going to fall down his narrow stairs in a drunken stupor and break his neck.
Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round centres on a group of middle aged men who decide to partake in an ‘experiment’ wherein they endeavour to maintain a blood alcohol content of 0.05%, theorising it might help them to overcome their insecurities. By turns darkly comic and thoroughly sobering, it gets a lot right about alcohol. The family of Mads Mikkelsen’s Martin are peripheral figures, but it was his eldest son who my focus was on during a specific scene. Martin comes to after blacking out whilst drunk, and finds himself sprawled on the floor outside his neighbour’s house with a gash on his head. As his son arrives to practically carry his father back home, I was briefly pitched back into that 11 year old headspace; the constriction in my chest was immediately familiar. When I saw my grandpa tottering around in the dark the night of my dad’s birthday, I realised with a sudden pang that I was deeply frightened. Not frightened of him, I was frightened for him. It didn’t require much imagination for me to visualise his head connecting with the pavement.
It is also true, however, that drinking was one of the few things that seemed to loosen the knot of anxiety that so often seemed lodged in his throat. When it isn’t making you acutely aware of the intense fragility of the human body, alcohol does have that effect. Another Round, unlike most films I’ve seen about alcohol, is more than willing to acknowledge that drinking can be fun. Mikkelsen barely cracks a smile throughout the opening 15 minutes of the film. It’s only after imbibing what is surely a fairly heady combination of a shot of vodka and two glasses of red wine that he flashes those distinctive vulpine teeth in a grin.
It’s easy for movies about alcohol to end up feeling like message films, portentous and worthy and more than a little didactic. Growing up in the UK, where much of the populace have a uniquely bizarre relationship with alcohol, on-screen depictions of drinking – and by extension, alcoholism – seemed far too dramatic. In Britain, at least, there’s a particular mundanity to the idea of reliance on alcohol as a social aid. Certainly, my grandfather’s own issues with alcohol seemed to be the antithesis of riveting cinematic fodder. He was not a tortured, slurring martyr like Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born, nor a prickly, irritable fop like Richard E. Grant in Withnail and I. But an ageing man trying to harpoon a cod with the pole of a net, as the central quartet in Another Round find themselves doing? That’s not far off.
Vinterberg has spoken in interviews about his personal concept of the various ‘phases’ of alcohol. More experienced drinkers, he asserts in an AV Club interview, “have to drink to become (themselves) again,” and this is when you have a problem. This statement rang startlingly true. My grandfather never seemed more himself than when he’d sunk a pint or two. It was his default state, in a way. That in and of itself was perhaps more concerning than I realised when he was alive. He was never a violent drunk, never aggressive or even hostile. His relationship with alcohol seemed, at times, remarkably uncomplicated. Most of the time, it made him feel good, and he did not appear to have agonised over precisely why he did not feel wholly himself whilst sober. The fortifying power of alcohol, the way it can make you feel, as Magnus Millang’s Nikolaj puts it, “more relaxed, and poised, and musical, and open,” is something that Vinterberg does not shy away from. “I haven’t felt this good in ages,” Martin asserts in the early stages of their ‘experiment.’ What is slightly heart-breaking about this is that it is clearly true. Under the influence of alcohol, Martin is a man transformed. Early in the film, Mikkelsen strikes the viewer as almost nebbish – this is achieved entirely through his physical performance. Martin’s movements are compact and insular. He offers tight smiles which are really just a diffident twist of his mouth, and can only intermittently make eye contact with his students, who smell blood in the water and quickly set upon him for his perceived apathy.
Whilst drunk, the cord of tension which has thus far seemed strung from his toes to the crown of his head, folding him in on himself, abruptly snaps. Seeing this, I felt a pang of recognition. It isn’t wholly the same, but my grandfather fastidiously combed his hair into a severe side-parting that only grew deeper as his hair thinned. After his death, we found little pocket-sized combs in almost every pair of trousers he owned. When drunk, he allowed that grave side parting to fall a little out of place. Alcohol makes people messy and elastic in a way which is often quite charming, because it feels real. It generates a feeling of closeness and intimacy, sometimes, seeing someone drunk. You can observe the change in their posture, the warm sheen of their unfocused eyes, the ease of their smile. It’s fun, seeing them unfiltered, increasingly unconcerned by our usual preoccupation with filtering ourselves through the prism of how others might perceive us, perhaps even untroubled by ideas of the ‘correct’ way to behave. They seem to be acting on instinct as opposed to convention. It’s fun until it isn’t. ‘Messy,’ in all its very human indignity and warmth and humour, can be fun. ‘Disorderly,’ in its muddled chaos, its tumultuous sense of dislocation within your own body, can be terrifying.
The sequence wherein Martin delivers a rousing lesson, having finally surpassed the 0.05% BAC threshold the men have set for themselves, is a bravura piece of filmmaking. Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s camera swoops back and forth a little unsteadily, gets just that bit too close to Martin’s face, lapses out of focus for a few seconds here and there. It is exciting and energetic and teeters just on the brink of dizzying. That same description could apply to much of the film’s first half, which is vibrant and frequently hilarious, but also precarious.
When it all finally descends into disorder, it’s devastating.Thankfully, it is also almost totally unrecognisable to me. I do not see my grandfather in Tommy, Thomas Bo Larsen’s gym teacher who is the first and only member of the central quartet to willingly surrender to the looming spectre of total, blinding alcoholism. Or at least, not as much as I see him in the other three men. In a Rolling Stone interview, Mikkelsen describes the characters as being “in the part of their life when the train has left the platform and they are standing there, watching the train leaving.” I can’t claim with any degree of confidence that this is how my grandfather felt. It certainly seemed that way to me. He did not appear to have been a man prone to introspection, nor to any form of self-pity. He told me the facts of his life, not the feelings, but it is hard not to conclude that he must have been a lonely child, and he was undeniably an exceedingly shy adult. I don’t know how unique he was amidst that post-war generation, how many men of his age seem quite that convinced that they are in some way burdensome. I do know that Another Round, a film about men lost within the mire of themselves, dimly aware that they’ve lost something but unsure of how to get it back, reminded me of him.
It’s unpredictable, when and where you see the faces of people you love and have loved swimming to the surface of your consciousness. I had hoped to see grandpa in Ikiru, but he wasn’t there. I was quietly devastated. I had hoped so ardently that Akira Kurosawa’s film about a desperately lonely man who is able to go contentedly to his death would ring true in some way, that it would envelop me and soothe me and help to make sense of my loss. But it felt empty. Vinterberg’s often hilarious, frequently piercing, ultimately life-affirming dark comedy brought my grandpa back to me in a rush. He is not there fully realised, of course, but I catch glimpses of him, shimmering fragments of his personhood reflected through the lens of those four lonely men giggling and play-fighting like children.
My grandfather danced when he was drunk. A lot of reviews have picked up on the sense of suspended reality that characterises the fantastic dance sequence that ends the film, but I don’t think it constitutes such a break from the rest of the film’s style as to feel jarring. Admittedly, my grandfather was not a trained dancer, as Mikkelsen is. His version of Martin’s breathtakingly acrobatic routine was a stilted air guitar rendition of Byran Adams’ Summer of ’69. It was dancing nonetheless, and characterised by such a free and easy sense of elation as to be just as uplifting as Mikkelsen’s impressive handspring.
I wish he had been able to achieve that sense of joy without alcohol in his veins, I really do, but I don’t know that that was ever possible. I cannot begrudge nor resent him for turning with such regularity to the one substance that was guaranteed to take him out of himself for long enough that he ended up dancing. Another Round’s quiet refusal to castigate reflects, in many ways, my own stance on the hot button issue of alcohol. I am aware of just how very dangerous alcohol is. Knowing that, however, does nothing to dispel the potency of the image of my grandfather really, genuinely smiling. Vinterberg, whose 19 year old daughter, Ida, died a week into the production of Another Round, describes the film as “full of love and grief.” Perhaps for me, the grief I associate with the film will abate with time. The love, I am sure, will not.
