Knightley, Skarsgård helm predictable but entertaining post-War melodrama
With Jordan Peele’s Get Out follow-up Us opening today and receiving a ton of buzz, you may not realize there actually are a few other quieter, less high-profile films opening today as well. One of these is The Aftermath, an old-fashioned historical drama that, while somewhat forgettable and ultimately predictable, is a serviceable alternative for those searching for something less intense than Peele’s headline-grabbing horror flick.
British director James Kent (2014’s Testament of Youth and a host of TV credits) teams with writers Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse to bring Welsh author Rhidian Brooks’s 2013 bestseller of the same name to the big screen. The result is a post-WWII tale that should satisfy those with a penchant for decently executed melodrama.
The picture opens in Hamburg five months after the Allied victory. The city is decimated, with hundreds of thousands dead and displaced. We learn that more bombs were dropped on Hamburg in one weekend than in London in all of the War. Against this somber background, we meet the beautiful but sad (did you expect anything else?) British Rachael (Keira Knightley), arriving with her British Colonel husband Lewis (Jason Clarke); he’s been assigned to help with Hamburg’s post-War rebuilding. The couple moves into a spacious, graceful mansion owned by the equally beautiful but sad war widower Stefan Lubert, a former German architect with piercing blue eyes (Alexander Skarsgård). In the spirit of reconciliation, Lewis, much to Rachael’s dismay, allows Stefan and his troubled teenage daughter Freda (Flora Thiemann) to stay on in a wing of the house. Without this act of charity, Stefan and his daughter would have been sent to a temporary shelter camp.
Stefan insists he opposed the Nazis from the beginning and was never a Party member, but Rachael, who still has not forgiven the Germans for a personal tragedy, is doubtful. Her chilliness inside the uneasily shared house echoes the bleak winter outside. She’s not eager to share such close quarters with the former enemy, although Stefan, too, has suffered a similar loss. With the conflict thus established, the audience merely has to wait for the inevitable. With Lewis working long hours and Rachael left alone in the house with Stefan, do you think those icy stares and sharp words might conceal some repressed passions? It’s no spoiler to say that the film’s story plays out like a classic drugstore romance novel, as Rachael’s frosty demeanor begins to thaw thanks, in large part, to a rather sturdy dining room table.
A side story about young Freda taking up with an angry Hitler Youth eventually leads to the film’s climax, a moment reminiscent of a famous scene in The Great Gatsby (in which, coincidentally, in Baz Luhrmann’s version, Clarke also plays a cuckolded husband). An emotionally raw and honest discussion between Lewis and his wife follows, in one of the film’s better acted scenes. That, in turn, plays a part in the Yep-I-See-That-Coming safe ending that may divide audiences, who no doubt will either be Team Stefan or Team Lewis.
German cinematographer Franz Lustig should be commended for helping achieve the film’s brooding, melancholy mood; you can almost feel the weight of the grey wet skies and the bitter cold of the snow-covered streets. Period costumes by Serbian costume designer Bojana Nikitovic also are lovely to look at, and contribute to the picture’s retro cinematic tone. And Knightley, Clarke, and Skarsgård do their best with the stagy material. Clarke gives the picture’s strongest performance by far, as he gets the most interesting emotional arc. Knightley and Skarsgård, though they manage well enough, don’t evolve much beyond the I-Hate-You/I-Love-You trope endemic to bodice rippers.
But in the midst of all the soapy theatrics, Kent does manage to convey some truths about grief, loss, and the unfathomable toll that war can take on those who remain. His picture may not win any awards, but, as the newest addition to the historical fiction canon, it should suitably entertain the genre’s die-hard fans.
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The Aftermath opens today at Bay Area theaters.
