Thomas Vinterberg understands how the wish to keep a family together can become an excuse for cruelty. His uncomfortable comedy and strong ensemble performances earn our recommendation, even when the writing pushes too hard.
Fi1m perspective
In The Celebration (1998), everyone has come to honour a father, and the birthday gathering struggles to accommodate revelations of abuse. Vinterberg watches the effort to remain a respectable family become horrible. We laughed at their determination to preserve the occasion, then felt ashamed because the comedy continued while abuse was being discussed. He allows that discomfort to last rather than providing separate passages for laughter and distress. The performances make the ordeal worth staying with.
Vinterberg and co-writer Mogens Rukov understand how a reunion can send adults back into family arrangements they ought to have outgrown. That gives the actors something recognisable to work with before the confrontations become more extreme. The restless handheld photography sometimes gets between us and those performances, and can expose how deliberately a supposedly unruly scene has been arranged. The Dogme 95 restrictions do not make the writing any less calculated. Some exchanges push towards melodrama, though that never wipes out our interest in the people having them.
The Celebration was his breakthrough and the first Dogme 95 film. He had co-founded the movement in 1995. The English-language It’s All About Love (2003) and Dear Wendy (2005) met a mixed reception, before Submarino (2010) and The Hunt (2012) marked a successful return to Danish-language drama. Those changes of language did not settle into a permanent retreat: Far from the Madding Crowd (2015) took him into English-language literary adaptation. His career gives us little reason to treat the birthday film’s rough photography as a requirement for everything that follows.
The recurring concern is what families and communities ask their members to endure. The Hunt, starring Mads Mikkelsen, concerns false accusation and community hysteria; Another Round (2020) turns to midlife crisis and alcohol. We come to Vinterberg for people trying, and often failing, to live alongside one another, with particular confidence in his ability to direct an ensemble under pressure. Start with The Celebration, but do not choose it to improve the mood after a difficult family visit.
Biography
Thomas Vinterberg is a Danish film director and screenwriter. He co-founded the Dogme 95 movement with Lars von Trier in 1995. He graduated from the National Film School of Denmark in 1993.
Vinterberg achieved international recognition with The Celebration (1998), which he directed and co-wrote. The film was the first made under Dogme 95 rules and won the Jury Prize at Cannes. His later work includes Submarino (2010), The Hunt (2012), Far from the Madding Crowd (2015), The Commune (2016) and Another Round (2020). For the latter he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director; the film won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.
