The Celebration: Movie Review (2008)

Editor's Note: Still roaming around the archives, searching for movies to recommend. I came upon this, a fine foreign-language film from 1998. I remember enjoying it a great deal, particularly since it offered something different. Below is the original review:

Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Celebration” employs fresh, sometimes startling elements that can be directly attributed to Dogma 95, the Danish filmmakers’ collective that demands, at its heart, cinematic purity from bare-bones production.

Shot directly on video with hand-held cameras, the film has been blown up to 35-mm, giving it a vital, slightly grainy look that complements the occasional horror of what’s unfolding on screen, while only rarely detracting from it.

Following Dogma 95’s so-called “Vow of Chastity,” everything seen and heard in “The Celebration” is natural: the sound, the sets, the lighting. Nothing here has been embellished with special camera work, music or with computerized effects. It fits no genre because with the Dogma movement, genre films have been deemed unacceptable.

The Vow--itself entertaining--reads like the gushing of a hopeful young idealist. An excerpt: “I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.”

No, Spielberg has not signed on, but what may surprise some is how effective these dictums are in helping to create one of 1998's more interesting films.

On one level, “The Celebration” is about the birthday celebration of a wealthy 60-year-old man; on another, it is about the disgrace and vilification of that man by his remaining three children. But as well as the film’s story is written, and as strong as its performances are, the film is compelling primarily because Vinterberg’s hand-held camera is used as a tool to implicate the audience as a guest at this party.

With his camera constantly seeking the action as it unfolds, we become part of the crowd, dodging the stinging, verbal bullets crisscrossing the festooned tables like deadly warheads. It is great fun to watch--farce hinging on the unwanted, uncomfortable, embarrassing truth.

Grade: A-