Out Stealing Horses
Literary novels, driven by ideas and characterizations rather than propelled principally by plot, often don’t translate well to film. (See, for example, The Lovely Bones or any movie based on Faulkner.) Out Stealing Horses is the rare exception, its complexity and rich emotions seemingly intact. Which doesn’t mean you need to have read Per Petterson’s 2003 award-winning book to appreciate the movie (I have not). Rather, watching the film provides an experience similar to reading a great book — events unfold gradually and with poignant imagery and sharply drawn characters. There’s plenty of plot — injury, death, betrayal, desertion — but it’s in the service of the storyteller’s very human lessons.
In this case, the central storyteller is Trond (Swedish star Stellan Skarsgård), a Norwegian man in his late 60s who has retreated to rural Sweden on a pension after the death of his wife. He spends his time reliving the summer of 1948, when he was 15 and lived with his father in a woodsy cabin on the outskirts of a closely knit Norwegian village. Yes, it’s one of those “the summer that changed everything” movies, and the title refers to young Frond’s last moment of unfettered freedom, riding a neighbor’s horses bareback without permission.
Beyond that, it would be difficult (and rather pointless) to summarize the movie’s complex plot. Trond says early on that it’s the last summer he saw his father, and the day of the horse “stealing,” the teenage Trond notices there’s something wrong with his friend Jon, so the two boys’ idyll is short-lived. The family tragedy on which everything turns is heartbreaking and yet elegantly rendered. In the “present,” elderly Trond meets a neighbor who turns out to have a connection to his past (one excuse for his memory exercise), and his chosen isolation bears explanation.
There’s a touch of sexuality from The Summer of ‘42, a dash of death from Stand by Me, and parallels to the bipolar parenting of Boyhood, but Out Stealing Horses blazes its own path. Writer-director Hans Petter Moland has a great eye for the Norwegian landscapes, making nature integral to the narrative and the film’s visual palette without resorting to postcard-like lingering — both in Frond’s icy isolation in winter-time Sweden and in his fragrant summer reflections. The logging sequences, for example, are both intriguing and picturesque but also dense with narrative development.
Moland also has a fine hand with actors of all ages, coaxing out potent expressions of difficult emotions without melodrama. Skarsgård, familiar from his Thor-adjacent appearances in Marvel movies, has rarely been better, and teenager Jon Ranes, as his younger counterpart, is quite a find — boyish but with a great capacity for melancholy. Tobias Santelmann, as Trond’s simmering, discontented father, is reminiscent of Martin Donovan from his The Opposite of Sex era.
The movie ends not with big plot twists, but with gradual revelations about human frailty and forgiveness worthy of an Ang Lee film. Some viewers may find the movie a bit pokey and inconclusive, but I found its incremental evolutions true and touching, and the filmmaking is sharp throughout. Given that director Moland last helmed the Liam Neeson bloody dark comedy Cold Pursuit (based on his own Norwegian film, In Order of Disappearance), he seems poised for a Hollywood breakthrough — and instead is sticking to filmmaking in Norway, planning next to direct a crime novel by Norwegian writer Karin Fossum. That’s fine. I’ll read subtitles for Moland anytime.
Grade: A-minus. Not rated but PG-13 equivalent for some dark turns. Available August 7 from Grail Moviehouse’s Sofa Cinema streaming service.
(Photo: Magnolia Pictures)
