CIFF: King's Highway

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 14, 2010 6:00PM

This is part of Chicagoist's coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival.

If there's one thing to learn from watching King's Road, Valdís Óskarsdóttir's overtly quirky ensemble comedy-drama, it's that should one be obligated to get stuck indefinitely in a remote trailer park, Iceland is the place to do it. Everybody is interesting but harmless, the landscape is beautiful, it's not even that cold, and the lighting (even inside) is at all times very flattering.

The handsome trashiness of it all seems to be lost on the little community's inhabitants, who are each stuck in different ways, as unable to get moving as the supposedly mobile homes they inhabit. This changes when a couple of outsiders are introduced into the mix. Björn Hlynur Haraldsson stars as a young man returning from years abroad seeking the help of his father, a phobic former banker who runs a half-baked moneymaking scheme from the remote trailer park. Daniel Brühl, fresh from his high-profile performances in Inglourious Basterds and The Bourne Ultimatum, is his friend from abroad, half slumming and half on the run. The population of oddballs is teeming: a caretaker with an anger management problem, a washed-up musician who hides his drinking from his pregnant wife, a pair of comically simpleminded crossing guards, a couple that does nothing but listen to music and smoke cigarettes in the front seat of their car, to name a few.

Director Óskarsdóttir has a practiced eye (she has edited some wonderful films, most notably Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and a host of important Dogme titles), and the film is pretty despite it's shabby subject. There aren't many genuine surprises that deliver any surprise: you can feel the transformative redemption lumbering around the corner of each scene, and like a sitcom on a trajectory for satisfactory resolution within a 22-minute timeframe, there is never very much at stake. While we do actually care about some of the characters, it feels a little too much like a theater company simply being turned loose with the "quirky" dial set to ten and the cameras rolling. It's light-hearted fare and amusing enough, but somehow all the pointedly idiosyncratic elements don't add up to an original whole.

King's Road screens on October 16 and 18.