‘Sentimental Value’ Review

As I left the theater after seeing Joachim Trier’s astonishing ‘Sentimental Value’, a couple of old quotes came into my head. One was James Joyce’s statement that he sets all of his stories in Dublin because “in the particular is contained the universal.”

The other was the famous opening sentence from Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

‘Sentimental Value’ is a deeply moving portrait of just such an unhappy family, running away from conflict in favor of pouring their trauma into art. It is a story both stunningly specific, depicting a grieving family, all at different points in their lives, while universal in how aptly it captures inherited pain and anxieties.

Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas play sisters, Nora and Agnes, whose lives are disrupted when their estranged father, film director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), comes back into their lives after the death of their mother. In an effort to reconnect with Nora, who has built a career acting in the theater, Gustav approaches his daughter with a script, a role he has written specifically for her. Gustav’s attempts to make this film, first with his daughter Nora and eventually with the famed American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), serves as the main plot of the film, though in its episodic storytelling, ‘Sentimental Value’ is much more interested in exploring these flawed characters, trying to love and be loved, without judgment.

The acting is impeccable, stunning in how natural every performer comes off such that if you’d never seen any of these performers before, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a real family that Joachim Trier somehow received permission to film. When they argue, when they console, when they just be together, there’s something so authentic to all of the character relationships. In one party scene, you see Gustav and Nora sharing a cigarette in silence, smiles on their faces, so visibly comfortable in the each other’s company. Then moments later, back inside, Gustav thoughtlessly throws out the kind of hurtful comment to Nora only possible from somebody who understands another so well.

While the actors who make up the central family all give masterful performances, I want to take a moment to highlight Elle Fanning’s turn as an ambitious actress hoping to feature in not just a great movie, but a great work of art. Fanning’s performance is nuanced, communicating her own complicated interior life wordlessly, as her understanding of the film within the film converges and conflicts with Gustav’s own. It’s a difficult task for an actor to play an actor – conveying the roughness of a rehearsal performance, the experiments with accents, all without losing sight of the original character – but it’s a task Fanning pulls off with aplomb.

So much can be written about the film within the film, and all of Trier’s meta-commentary about how artists use art, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, as therapy, a means to deal with their personal suffering. And ‘Sentimental Value’ achieves the rare feat of portraying a great artist whose art actually appears great, with a single shot from one of Gustav’s older films, presented at a retrospective, perhaps the best shot in the entire film.

But while the film-within-a-film commentary adds wonderful texture, ‘Sentimental Value’s greatest strengths are in its humane depiction of a family struggling to reconnect despite years of built-up resentment and pain.

So much of Nora’s rage is in recognition or denial about how similar she is to her father, who abandoned her so young. Both Nora and Gustav constantly bemoan the fact that they struggle to communicate with one another, choosing instead to pour all of their unspoken emotions into their art. There’s a fear never remarked upon, but simmering throughout, that by allowing themselves to confront their real world feelings, they’ll grow so angry, so hateful that they will turn their hate inwards and be consumed by it. As these two artists wrestle with their big feelings, Agnes is wonderfully understated, ceding emotional space to the rest of the family, choosing to play the role of nonstop mediator even as she struggles with her own pain.

Joachim Trier refuses neat, Hollywood character arcs in favor of more complex, emotional journeys for everybody on screen. With such a tender attention to these incredibly fleshed out characters, ‘Sentimental Value’ leaves an indelible mark, poignant in its drama and staggering in its humanity.

Sentimental Value
Rated R for some language including a sexual reference, and brief nudity.
Running Time: 2 hours and 13 minutes

Director Joachim Trier
Writers Eskil Vogt, Joachim Trier
Stars Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning
Rating R
Running Time 133 Minutes
Genres Drama