Another Round

                    Mads Mikkelsen in "Another Round." Photo via IMDB

In the name of science, four male high school teachers hitting their 40s embark on an experiment. One of them has read a study saying humans function better with a constant blood alcohol level of .05 percent. They're also reminded of Ernest Hemingway who apparently drank daily to write, but then stopped at 8 p.m. so he'd be fresh to write again in the morning.

So they decide to try it out. Drinking every day before teaching their classes. What could go wrong?

Even though you think you know the answer to that question, the premise was intriguing enough for me to renew my Hulu subscription, at least long enough to check out “Another Round,” Denmark's contender for a foreign-language Academy Award that also won a best-director nomination for Thomas Vinterberg.

Mads Mikkelsen anchors the film with magnetic charisma that is brooding in one moment, achingly vulnerable in the next. But his three co-conspirator co-stars (I'll spare you their names that aren't exactly household words on this side of the Atlantic) do their parts traveling the slippery slopes from euphoria to reckless danger, and back again. 

Early data from the experiment are stunning.  The four sad sack instructors are reborn as Mr. Holland, that inspiring teacher each of us still remembers from our youth. The results they achieve are amazing, from classrooms  to the music department to the soccer field. But they all know they're treading, sometimes stumbling, on thin ice, rarely free of nervous glances back over their shoulders.

If this were a made-in-America project, it would be a simple cautionary tale and morality play. But maybe because it's Danish and subtitled, it seems considerably more complex and nuanced, a meditation on midlife maleness, marriages running on empty, and the loneliness of bachelorhood. 

It also winds up being a paean to teaching – a profession finally being recognized in terms akin to rocket science and first-responder bravery by anyone who has been pressed into service as a zoom teacher in these Covid times. In the film's high school, where final exams loom large, alcohol holds a place in students' lives, too. The movie begins with a class-wide drinking game that involves teams consuming cases of beer as they race around a lake, losing points if they throw up unless they do it as a team. 

Drinking like fish is apparently a national trait many Danes share. We can only wonder what role it plays in the fact that Denmark ranks No. 2 in a current study of the world's happiest societies. Its Nordic neighbors dominate the top five places in the survey.

While “Another Round” doesn't shy away from the perils of alcohol consumption, or from the constant recalibration of lines between ecstasy, humiliation and addiction, what is missing is the hypocrisy that often attaches itself to discussions of subjects like this in our culture. Scandinavians, according to sociologists pondering their high levels of national happiness, have different attitudes from ours on many topics from taxes (theirs are higher, they don't mind) and government (they trust theirs) to more personal choices of lifestyle and self-expression.

Foreign screen properties like this have a way of getting remade in Hollywood – think “Three Men and a Baby” or “The Upside.” In an American version it's hard to imagine the four buddies getting past their macho insecurities long enough to get to the places “Another Round” visits so comfortably.

One reviewer I heard on NPR suggested that the film has plenty of Hollywood touches already. No complaints from here – even though the story is rarely more than a few steps from depression (another Nordic trait), it becomes by the final freeze frame an exhilarating experience, a ride you're glad to have taken even if you got a case of the whirlies along the way.