Another Round

ANOTHER ROUND   ***

Thomas Vinterberg

2020

IDEA:  Looking to get out of their midlife funk, Martin and his high school teacher friends decide to test a psychiatrist's theory that humans would be better off with exactly .05% alcohol in their blood at all times.

BLURB:  In a society where economic equality and basic social protections are givens, what does it mean to have enough? Does material abundance beget complacency, ennui, even a sense of lack? These are the questions at the heart of Another Round, which uses a populace's relationship with alcohol as a means of meditating on Danish national identity, aging, and the inconstancy of contentment. Vinterberg sets the stage immediately, his opening scene of drunken teenage revelry signifying a culture of liberal inebriation and encapsulating the carefree, youthful indulgence from which his glum middle-aged protagonists have grown alienated. When Mads Mikkelsen’s Martin unexpectedly downs a few glasses of wine and vodka on the occasion of a friend’s birthday soon after, it is not joy that his weary countenance reflects. Celebratory drinking is thus juxtaposed with drinking as self-prescribed depressive treatment. These two impetuses of alcohol and their concomitant effects oscillate throughout the film, mirroring the ups and downs, excesses and deficiencies, that Martin and his pals seek to neutralize by maintaining blood-alcohol-level equanimity. If the subsequent, inevitable spiral into destructive crapulence comes across as too broadly and bluntly delineated (a problem that extends to the depiction of the characters' domestic lives), Another Round is more nimble in keeping up its fizzy tonal mixture, in which restless melancholy mingles with dark irony and the breeziness of a hangout comedy. These qualities come to a spectacular head in the film’s let-it-all-loose denouement, where Denmark’s young and old(er) are united in a euphoric bacchanal of optimism and denial. The buzz won’t stick around forever, but with so much booze to go around, it’s all too easy to convince oneself it will.