A big fan of Watkins' initial 1960s and early-1970s movies, including The War Game and Punishment Park, I'd shied away from Watkins' subsequent movies, which are longer and, in a sense, more literate-minded. Unlike Watkins' early movies, Edvard Munch sits in pretty safe arthouse territory. In addition to being about someone famous, it's actually about art (they don't call 'em art films for nothin'.) No, the thing about Edvard Munch that's interesting isn't necessarily Munch, but Watkins.
The life of the Norwegian artist best known for his painting "The Scream" gives Watkins pretty standard ingredients. There's a difficult family life (repressed Calvinists led by a stern doctor). There's female trouble (his great love dumps him and continues to be agonizingly near within the European demimonde). And there's a lack of appreciation for Munch's expressionistic work, made at a time when most art was still sticking to, as the narration describes it, "exterior reality." But Watkins does an interesting job of shaping these ingredients into something more distinctive than most similar movies.
Not surprisingly to anyone who's seen a Watkins movie already, the writer-director blends documentary and fiction storytelling. Edvard Munch is heavier in narration than most movies, with Watkins' typically Brechtian narration filling in background details in a very detached manner. An unseen woman also interviews characters from time-to-time and, even during the more conventionally dramatized action, characters (especially Munch, played by Geir Westby) are somewhat aware of the camera's presence. As on TV's The Office, during difficult moments characters sometimes shoot the camera a sheepish glance, as if they can't help it.
Also not surprising for anyone familiar with Watkins' work, he finds political meaning in Munch's struggles. The moviemaker no doubt related to the regular criticism of Munch's art: that it was too dark, that it probed into the wrong areas, that it wasn't respectful of authority and order. That's what Watkins' detractors had been telling him. Much of the action in Edvard Munch involves the tussle between the artistic subculture and the prevailing bourgeois mores governing society in Norway, where Munch was born and raised, and in Germany, where he spent much of his adult life. This conflict not only colors Munch's career, it also influences his love life and his own internal struggles. His great love, whom he refers to in his diaries as "Mrs. Heiberg" (Gro Fraas), is a married woman when Munch meets her, while Munch's own family was firmly among the strict, religious, bourgeois ruling class.
In his shooting style and his political emphasis, Watkins brings an engaging context to Munch's life. His sound and image editing is also very remarkable. Watkins lets the sights and sounds that haunt Munch also haunt his movie, by letting sounds (including crying and the sound of Munch's paint brush on canvas) and snippets of images (especially those of Mrs. Heiberg and of the sickness that filled Munch's childhood home) bleed into other scenes. Few movies represent the jumble of present and past that is our moment-to-moment consciousness. Another area in which most movies fail but Edvard Munch excels is in giving some sense of its subject's artistic process, especially in devoting a large chunk of time to the metamorphosis of Munch's painting "The Sick Child."
Not that Edvard Munch is without problems. Conventional dramatization is often not Watkins' strong suit, and Munch can be an annoyingly passive character. During the first half of the three-hour movie I feared that, as in The Notorious Bettie Page, the hero might become the least defined person in the movie and, as in The New World, the reliance of voice-over over dialogue might erect an invisible wall around the hero. But as his emotional context develops along with Watkins' editing approach here, Munch comes across more forcefully. As he usually does, Watkins again works with a cast of non-professionals who acquit themselves very well.
Edvard Munch is not the first movie I would point prospective Watkins fans towards (The War Game is), and it's not even a movie I will necessarily revisit. But as an example of how a moviemaker can enliven a clichéd genre and as yet another notch on Watkins' considerable "belt" of work, it's a keeper.
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by Paul Sherman
