Thomas Vinterberg’s family reunion is funny, distressing and well worth the discomfort. The handheld photography sometimes gets between us and the actors, but the performances keep this birthday confrontation from becoming merely an exercise in making everyone miserable.
A family birthday is a useful place to test what people will put up with for the sake of appearing affectionate. Thomas Vinterberg makes that test cruel in The Celebration, as a patriarch’s gathering is disrupted by revelations of abuse. It is a disturbing, often funny drama that we recommend warmly, with a warning that its agitated photography can be hard work. Vinterberg and co-writer Mogens Rukov understand how a reunion can make adults seem trapped in arrangements they ought to have outgrown.
The birthday matters because everyone has arrived to honour the same man, and questioning him spoils the occasion before it changes anything else. We laughed at the family’s efforts to preserve its respectability, then felt ashamed of ourselves. The comedy continues while abuse is being discussed, and the insistence on having a proper birthday becomes horrible to watch. Vinterberg does not make the subject manageable by separating the funny passages neatly from the painful ones.
Ulrich Thomsen, as Christian, is essential to that uneasy mixture, keeping the performance direct when the writing risks becoming emphatic. Henning Moritzen, as the father, has the authority a birthday patriarch needs: the occasion already tells us how much attention belongs to him. Thomas Bo Larsen’s Michael and Paprika Steen’s Helene help make the reunion feel crowded with separate grievances, and their discomfort never looks interchangeable. The performances make these people recognisable enough for their behaviour to hurt.
Anthony Dod Mantle’s handheld photography makes the gathering uncomfortable to look at even before we have decided what to make of the people in it. The unstable images deny us the pleasant distance a more polished family drama might offer. We do occasionally want him to stop moving, and there are moments when the roughness draws attention away from the actors. Those distractions matter because watching the faces is already demanding enough.
Editor Valdís Óskarsdóttir keeps the reunion moving without smoothing away its awkwardness. There is time to register how differently the actors respond to the pressure, and the cutting does not reduce the party to a queue of people waiting to speak. Lars Bo Jensen’s music offers little comfort, which suits material that should not be made reassuring. The actors have room to make the confrontations untidy.
The limitations are in Vinterberg and Rukov’s writing as much as in the restless camera. Some of the confrontations feel pushed towards melodrama, and we become conscious of how carefully this apparently unruly gathering has been arranged. The Dogme 95 restrictions do not prevent that; the rough photography sometimes makes the more calculated writing conspicuous. Against the familiar family-reunion drama, though, the film is unusually willing to let embarrassment turn nasty and keep the comedy going.
At 101 minutes, it does not ask us to endure the occasion for the length of a real family party. That is probably a mercy. Do not choose it as an easy evening’s entertainment, however much laughter we have mentioned. Choose it when both of you are prepared for abuse to be part of the conversation afterwards.
