3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, and needlessly, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang
Thor Heyerdahl’s Oscar-winning
1950 documentary about his famed ocean voyage was a frequent attraction during
my grade school and middle school years; I must have seen it at least three
times before hitting my teens.
Enraged by the constant presence of the always dangerous sharks, Torstein (Jakob Oftebro, left) and Knut (Tobias Santelmann) foolishly decided to kill one of the predatory creatures. |
I also read Heyerdahl’s published
account of the expedition — 1948’s Kon-Tiki:
Across the Pacific in a Raft — and noted that articles about him were
fairly common in National Geographic
in the 1960s and early ’70s (which is deliciously ironic, given the magazine’s
initial refusal to treat him seriously).
I therefore approached the new
dramatized account of Heyerdahl’s 101-day journey on a balsa wood raft —
Norway’s recent nominee for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award (losing to
Austria’s Amour) — like a reunion
with a long-unseen friend. And, on that level, this new Kon-Tiki does not disappoint.
Directors Joachim Rønning and
Espen Sandberg have crafted a respectful, detail-laden account of Heyerdahl’s
voyage that plays very much like a valentine: quite similar to the
family-friendly tone Brian Helgeland gives Jackie Robinson’s story, in 42. This worshipful atmosphere is
amplified by the almost saintly aura that star Pål Sverre Hagen gives his reading
of Heyerdahl; once granted the months-at-sea affectation of a scraggly beard,
and the Christ-like framing by cinematographer Geir Hartly Andreassen, we
almost expect a halo to appear over Hagen’s head.
OK,
so Heyerdahl’s messianic qualities are larded on rather thickly, but I suppose
we can forgive everybody concerned; after all, the famed explorer remains one
of Norway’s most cherished native sons.
The
performances are heartfelt and credible, and the film certainly captures both
the adventurous spirit and eventual doubts experienced by Heyerdahl and his
five companions, as the journey progresses. But scripter Petter Skavlan is much
better at back-story and laying the groundwork for the Kon-Tiki’s trip, than in
conveying the day-after-grinding-day reality of their experiences, once the
raft is launched.
On
top of which, several sequences feel like Hollywood-ized peril, clearly
exaggerated for dramatic impact. Such moments give the film an embroidered,
boys-own-adventure aura: unfortunate, when an unvarnished depiction of these
events should have been sufficiently absorbing.
Heyerdahl
and his wife, Liv (Agnes Kittelsen), are introduced in 1937, during their
yearlong research trip to Fatu Hiva, a tiny island in the Marquesas group in
the middle of the Pacific. This initial study of Polynesia, a collaboration
with the University of Oslo’s zoological facility, hoped to reveal how a
previously deserted Pacific island’s flora and fauna could have reached it.
It
must have been a magical year for this young Norwegian couple, essentially
living alone during their research in paradise, and this film deftly sketches both
Thor and Liv’s loving and collaborative relationship, and Thor’s growing
interest in a new theory. Conventional wisdom at the time suggested that
Polynesia had been populated, long ago, by people from Southeast Asia;
Heyerdahl became convinced that ocean currents and prevailing winds suggested
something else.
The
crucial moment, lifted for this film directly from Heyerdahl’s book, comes when
a Polynesian elder quite dramatically insists that “Tiki” brought his ancestors
to the islands. In Heyerdahl’s mind, that points to Peru.
Unfortunately, he faces an uphill
battle, while trying to gain acceptance for this belief. Years pass, during
which he is ignored or dismissed by publishers, universities and, yes, National Geographic. Undeterred but now
convinced that he’ll gain credibility in only one way, Heyerdahl decides to
reproduce one of the voyages that he believes must have taken place 1,500 years
earlier, and do so down to the last detail.
Meaning, the raft must be built
only with materials that would have been available to those ancient peoples.
Heyerdahl constructs this
ungainly craft with a team of four experienced colleagues: radio experts Knut
Haugland (Tobias Santelmann) and Torstein Raaby (Jakob Oftebro), Swedish
sociologist Bengt Danielsson (Gustaf Skarsgård) and navigator Erik Hesselberg
(Odd Magnus Williamson). They name their craft the Kon-Tiki, after the Inca sun
god. (It would be nice to understand how Heyerdahl knows these men, and comes
to select them, but that’s one of many details Skavian’s script glosses over.)
They’re joined by
engineer-turned-refrigerator salesman Herman Watzinger (Anders Baasmo
Christiansen), an “average Joe” sort who befriends Heyerdahl and embraces the
expedition for the “thrill of adventure.”
The roly-poly Watzinger is
employed as this saga’s weak psychological link: a well-meaning, likable fellow
who hasn’t the faintest idea what he has let himself in for. It could be argued
that this depiction is both unkind and unfair, since we get the impression that
Watzinger is quite useless during this journey, when in real life he collected
and recorded valuable weather data about the then-unstudied Pacific.
The raft’s seventh member is
Raaby’s pet parrot, Lorita, which — on at least one occasion — creates the sort
of mischief one would expect from a 1960s Disney comedy.
Once past the jubilant glow that
briefly lingers after they begin the journey, the men fall into a routine of
observation, logbook entries and efforts to maneuver their ungainly raft. Early
problems are what we would expect: storms and dangerous ocean swells, ever-present
sharks and boredom.
Additional tension results from
Skavlan’s distortion of actual events, starting with a malfunctioning radio
that rarely seems to work ... at least, according to what we watch here. This belies
the regular broadcasts that Haugland and Raaby made to American, Canadian and
South American stations, which relayed the transmissions to the Norwegian Embassy
in Washington, D.C.
Hesselberg also worries, day by
passing day, that they’re heading northwest, rather than the desired
west/southwest that will allow their raft to be embraced by the crucial South Equatorial
Current: essentially an ocean expressway to Polynesia. Heyerdahl advises
patience and faith, Hagen’s piercing blue eyes taking on an obsessive, mildly
unsettling quality as the explorer stubbornly clings to his convictions.
At about the same time, Watzinger
announces that their huge balsa wood logs — the essential framework of their
raft — are absorbing water at a dangerous rate, with stray balsa chips becoming
heavy enough to sink. Clearly, this is a very
serious issue ... and yet we never get closure. Do Heyerdahl and his companions
solve this problem? Ignore it? Impossible to say, because...
...once the Kon-Tiki finally,
happily, slides into the South Equatorial Current, the saga jumps forward
several months, to the raft’s climactic arrival in Polynesia.
If this narrative leap feels
abrupt and absurdly jarring, you’re not imagining things. Rønning and Sandberg
made a 118-minute film, but this American release — courtesy of the Weinstein
Company — has been abbreviated to 101 minutes. Clearly, some essential details
have been left behind.
That’s shameful.
Santelmann, Oftebro, Skarsgård
and Williamson look and sound right for their respective roles, although we
don’t get much in the way of character development. At times, Heyerdahl’s
strongest relationship appears to be with a small Peruvian crab that has
hitched a ride on the raft, becoming a living example of how one species could
travel 4,300 nautical miles to make a new home.
Hagen’s Heyerdahl gets the lion’s
share of Skavlan’s character exposition, particularly during the lengthy first
act, as the explorer refines his theory and mounts the expedition. Hagen is
wholly credible as a determined researcher who won’t back down, his slightly
mocking smile greeting each setback with ever-greater determination.
Ironically, modern DNA theory and
other scientific studies have reaffirmed the original belief regarding
Polynesians having ancestors from Southeast Asia, but of course that doesn’t
diminish the adventurous awesomeness of Heyerdahl’s journey by raft. And his
expedition certainly proves that South American natives could have made a similar trip.
If this film — particularly our
bowdlerized American cut — too often feels like the gentled-down cinematic
equivalent of a young adult novel, well, that also doesn’t lessen Heyerdahl’s
contributions to world knowledge (and let’s not forget that he would go on to
make many more expeditions, before dying in 2002, at the age of 87).
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