Berlinale: "Mammoth", de Lukas Moodysson (Screen Daily y Variety)

Jonathan Romney in Berlin

Dir/scr: Lukas Moodysson. Sweden-Germany-Denmark. 2009. 125mins.

Aptly named, Mammoth is an elephantine dud from a director who has plenty to say about the state of the world – and not a whit of new insight to offer nor artistic invention to express it. Sweden's Lukas Moodysson weighs in with a pedantic and patronizing lesson about globalization, ecology and how it's ultimately the kids that suffer.

The film is a sidestep from his previous works A Hole In My Heart and Container, which, abrasive as they were, had the virtue of brazen experimentalism. Mammoth, by contrast, is a slickly mainstream globetrotting Grand Statement, of the type represented by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel . The film offers slim export prospects and its pious superficiality will deter fests outside the strictly middlebrow bracket.

Set in New York, Thailand and the Philippines, the film starts with a Manhattan nuclear family happily goofing around – doomy music over the opening titles suggesting that perhaps not all is well in their world. Dad is Leo (Bernal), a computer-games whiz about to fly off to Thailand
to clinch a hugely lucrative deal. His wife Ellen (Williams) is a devoted hospital doctor, who spends much of her time coping with the bloody deprivations of the New York streets. Both parents, to their regret, are too busy to see much of their 8-year-old daughter Jackie (Nyweide), but she is capably tended by nanny Gloria (Necesito), in turn missed by her own two young sons in the Philippines.

Flying to Bangkok with money man Bob (McCarthy), the prototypical Ugly American, Leo takes a solo trip to the coast, where his credentials as a right-on family guy are tested by a dalliance with bar girl Cookie (Srinikornchot). Finally, something terrible predictably happens to one of the kids in the story – an outcome directly traceable to the tyranny of money in the global state of things.

Moodysson's humourless, finger-wagging script ticks every expected box, and he's not averse to heavy visual underlining: Gloria shops for a football to send her boys at home, and a cutaway reveals the legend 'Made in the Philippines'; Ellen phones for a delivery pizza, pushing aside a pile of fresh market produce, photographed in gleaming close-up. Throughout, scenes of Third World poverty are cut pointedly against luxury hotel suites and other images of global decadence. Attention is duly paid to such themes as the Big Bang versus creationism, while even the spiritually beneficial effects of listening to whale song are touted at one point.

The adult cast copes adequately with paper-thin roles, while the children bring enthusiastic candour to what are at best 'universal innocent' parts. Marcel Zyskind shoots elegantly, but often opts for a postcard-style glamour of a kind that Mammoth might just conceivably be critiquing - although that might be to overestimate the film's strategy.

The film's title comes from a gift that Bob gives Leo: a $3000 pen inlaid with rare ivory from Siberian mammoths. The allusion is also – geddit? - to the capitalist global system, a wasteful titan doomed to extinction, though it applies equally well to the lumbering shaggy monster that Moodysson has created here.

Production companies
Memfis Film
Zentropa Entertainments Berlin
Zentropa Entertainments5
Film I Väst
Severiges Television
TV2 Denmark

Producer
Lars Jonsson

Cinematography
Marcel Zyskind

Production design
Josefin Asberg

Music
Jesper Kurlandsky
Erik Holmquist
Linus Gierta

Editor
Michal Leszczylowksi

Main cast
Gael Garcia Bernal
Michelle Williams
Marife Necesito
Sophie Nyweide
Run Srinikornchot
Tom McCarthy
Jan Nicdao

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Mammoth

Sweden - Germany - Denmark A Memfis Film (Sweden)/Zentropa Entertainments Berlin (Germany)/Zentropa Entertainments 5 ApS (Denmark) production in association with Film i Vast, Trollhattan, Swedish Television, TV2 Denmark, with support from Swedish Film Institute, Euroimages, Nordic Film & TV Fund, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Filmförderungsanstalt, Danish Film Institute, Media Programme of the European Community. (International sales: TrustNordisk, Hvidovre, Denmark). Executive producers, Lene Borglum, Peter Garde, Vibeke Windelov. Produced by Lars Jonsson. Co-producers, Peter Aalbaek Jensen, Maria Kopf, Gunnar Carlsson, Tomas Eskilsson. Directed, written by Lukas Moodysson.

Leo - Gael Garcia Bernal
Ellen - Michelle Williams
Gloria - Marife Necesito
Jackie - Sophie Nyweide
Cookie - Run Srinikornchot
Bob - Tom McCarthy
Salvador - Jan Nicdao
Manuel - Martin Delos Santos
Grandmother - Maria del Carmen

By ALISSA SIMON

The first English-lingo outing from Lukas Moodysson, one of Scandinavia’s most interesting and provocative writer-directors, finds him back in narrative mode after experiments such as “A Hole In My Heart” and “Container” confused or alienated arthouse fans attracted to “Show Me Love” “Together” and “Lilya 4-Ever.” A mixed bag, “Mammoth”‘s a good-looking, smoothly directed, continent-hopping drama about parents and children, globalization and the disconnect between rich and poor, but comes with too much repetitive exposition and without an emotional payoff. Helmer’s rep and top-lined stars will draw the curious. Potential buyers will have to decide for themselves.

Comparable in many ways to Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s “Babel,” the pic intercuts three stories, set variously in the U.S., the Philippines and Thailand, each involving working parents who regret they can’t spend more time with their offspring. However, the shallow, mega-wealthy, entitled American characters can afford top of the line replacement childcare in their deluxe Soho loft in contrast to single mother protags such as the Filipino nanny and the Thai sex worker, who struggle far from home in order to build a better life for their loved ones.

In what is probably the pic’s biggest mistake in terms of creating audience identification and emotional involvement, it posits a mostly unsympathetic New York couple as its central characters. Restless emergency room surgeon Ellen (Michelle Williams) and bored millionaire Internet games designer Leo (Gael Garcia Bernal) are mostly absentee parents to cheerful 7-year-old Jackie (Sophie Nyweide). But Jackie is cared for ‘round the clock by loving, live-in Filipino caregiver Gloria (glowing Marife Necesito), whose duties also include meal preparation and house cleaning.

Gloria must contend with Ellen’s obvious jealousy over Jackie’s fondness for her and the guilt trips laid on by her young sons Salvador (Jan icdao), 10, and Manuel (Martin Delos Santos), 7, whose plaintive phone calls from Manila reduce her to tears. One of the pic’s strongest sections involves Gloria’s mother (Maria del Carmen) showing Salvador that his life isn’t so tough, unwittingly precipitating a disaster that brings Gloria home sooner than planned.

When Leo travels to Thailand (on a private jet, natch) with sleazy business partner Bob (“The Visitor” helmer Tom McCarthy), he meets the pic’s third working mother, sexy bar girl Cookie (gorgeous Run Srinikornchot) whose energy lights up the screen. However, the Thai scenes further the feeling that Garcia Bernal’s idiot savant character comes from some completely different movie.

Top-billed stars Garcia Bernal and Williams look great, but can’t overcome their superficial, unlikeable characterizations and bland lines. The foreign supporting cast (whose scenes are mostly shot in Tagalog and Thai) also look good and rate higher on the likeability and credibility scales.

Expressively composed visuals shot in sharp widescreen by Danish lenser Marcel Zyskind are more telling than the vapid dialogue in Moodysson’s screenplay. The pic is filled with ironic moments, from the “Made in the Philippines” basketball that Gloria buys in New York to send back to her boys to Leo standing at the window of his luxury Bangkok hotel looking out on the polluted haze while sucking on “personal oxygen,” but overall pic never builds to a satisfying, explicit reckoning with its ambitious themes.

Glossy tech package is top notch with regular Moodysson collaborators taking editing, music and production design duties. Camera (color, widescreen), Marcel Zyskind; editor, Michal Leszczylowski; music, Jesper Kurlandsky, Erik Holmquist, Linus Gierta; production designer, Josefin Asberg; costume designer, Denise Ostholm; sound (Dolby SRD/DTS), Hans Moller. Reviewed at the Berlin Film Festival (competing), Feb. 8, 2009. Running time: 125 MIN.