In the Flesh: Another Round

The image of the crying dad is ubiquitous in popular culture, a kind of archetypal psychological upset within the framework of the American nuclear family which robs a child of the illusion of their father’s invulnerability. The second layer of horror present in this image, though, is that the unusual nature of this spectacle suggests an emotional deficit in the parent in question, an inability to feel or express sufficiently. Many of us also know that in a father, weakness might lead easily and seamlessly to an explosion of misdirected rage. That undercurrent of threat is present from the first moment we see Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) shed a few quiet tears while out to dinner with his friends, bemoaning the state of his life and marriage. What, one wonders, will emerge from this dry husk once it begins to touch its own emotions?

Another Round is ultimately too staid for my taste, but it is clear-eyed with regards to its protagonist. Martin’s journey into self-expression through constant low-level alcohol consumption is, for all that it proves — among other things — genuinely liberating, motivated by selfish avoidance and an inability to feel or to engage his own emotions. He misses his wife, so he embarks on a half-joking experiment in controlled alcoholism without consulting her in the slightest. He longs for a connection with his kids, so he gets blackout drunk and the older of the two has to walk him home, face averted in numb, affectless shame. And what does he do once he’s sobered up? In this moment of intimacy, his weakness revealed to his family, he withdraws first into bland mumbling and then into self-pitying, destructive rage, throwing a tantrum over the fact that while he was busy dissociating for fifteen years, his wife had a life of her own.

There’s a key scene midway through the film when Martin, on an impulsive and restorative canoe trip with his family, makes love to his wife for what seems like the first time in months, perhaps years. She breaks down crying then, admitting that she’s missed him, but when she says that perhaps it’s been too long he offers nothing but a squeeze. No words. No questions. He’s regained a little fire, but its light and heat are trapped inside him. If Another Round has a point beyond the charm of its leads and the tight, competent humor of its camera work, it lives in that silent tent, in the shape of a man not speaking.