He fights a battle for land and order

 

 A single-minded former military officer wants to develop a farm on soil has been deemed too tough to till. An unscrupulous land baron stands in his way.

  That may sound like a dozen Westerns you've seen, but The Promised Land, a sturdy frontier drama, takes place in mid-18th Century Denmark. 

  Mads Mikkelsen, at his flinty best, anchors a story that pits his character, the bastard child of a nobleman, against a sadistic aristocrat (Simon Bennebjerg) who'll do anything to maintain control of the Jutland heath.

   Director Nikolaj Arcel leans heavily on Mikkelsen's sternly chiseled performance while introducing themes that touch on racism and the cruelties of a hierarchical society.

   The Promised Land has as clearly a drawn villain as you could want. Bennebjerg's Frederik De Schinkel favors horrific measures of control, including scalding a runaway tenant farmer with boiling water. He brutally rapes the women who serve on his estate.

  Recognizable to American audiences for his work in Casino Royale (2006) and more recently, Indiana Jones the Dial of Destiny, Mikkelsen gives his Ludvig von Kahlen, the battle-scarred aura of a man who has seen too much.

   But Kahlen refuses to be defeated. He wants to spread civilization to the heath, and, in the long term, earn the status and recognition of a nobleman.

   No revolutionary, Kahlen doesn't aim to topple the prevailing order. He hopes to join it, and he believes he can curry the king's favor by proving that the land on the heath is arable. 

     Seen only once and briefly, the king wants to settle the  heath but his skeptical advisors work against him. They allow Kahlen to proceed as a way to humor the king. But they believe that even the strong-willed Kahlen won't be able to conquer the heath.

   Initially, Kahlen finds three allies for his work: a paster (Gustav Lindh) who wants to build a church on the heath and a couple (Morten Hee Andersen and Amanda Collin) who've fled Schinkel's tyranny.

   Kahlen also cares for a Roma child (Melina Hagberg) whose dark complexion turns her into an outcast and allows Arcel to expose the racist superstitions of the settlers Kahlen finally attracts.

   At various points, Kahlen also encounters an admiring noblewoman (Kristine Kujath Thorp) who disdains the prospect of marriage to Schinkel. She has her eye on him in a way that he can't quite handle.

   Gradually, Kahlen turns his crew into a family and by the film's end, we realize that Arcel has been staging a stark character study in which Kahlen's commitment to order collides with Schinkel's belief in a chaos, which he uses to justify his abominable behavior.

    I won't give away important plot points but relationships with Collin's character, who serves as a housekeeper, and with Hagberg's character allow Kahlen's humanity to emerge -- albeit in ways that don't break faith with the staunch fiber that compels him.

    The movie's third act feels a bit too compressed, and The Promised Land occasionally flirts with melodrama, but it tells an involving story that embodies the spirit of the bleak, unforgiving landscape on which it unfolds.

 

Little illuminated in 'Dark Tower'

Inspired by eight Stephen King novels, this summer movie may do a quick fade.

One of America's most popular and prolific authors, Stephen King wrote eight novels in his Dark Tower series. Instead of picking one of them, director Nikolaj Arcel and his team, which included Arcel and three additional writers, decided to make a big-screen mash-up of King's opus, cherry picking what they must have seen as choice elements for a screenplay.

The resultant movie -- The Dark Tower -- can be taken as a pean to unabashed eclecticism, drawing on everything from spaghetti westerns to sci-fi ploys to Tolkien-like fantasy.
Early fears that the movie would veer toward incoherence can be set aside. The Dark Tower -- which alternates between a world called Mid-World and present day New York City -- can be followed, but before it's done a different question emerges: Followed to what end?

Neither bad enough to offer the guilty pleasures of pure trash or good enough to constitute enthralling summer fun, the movie -- which clocks in at a merciful 95 minutes -- features a cast that includes Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, each of whom plays a character representing a different moral polarity. Elba portrays The Gunslinger, a cowboy seeking revenge against the Man in Black (McConaughey).

This disreputable Man in Black, also known as Walter, killed The Gunslinger's father and has devoted himself to destroying the Dark Tower.

The tower, which looks like a giant stalagmite that has been painted black, can be found at the center of a circle that encompasses many universes. If the tower falls, demons will be unleashed. Horrors will ensue. The Man in Black will capitalize, reigning over the chaos.

To achieve his evil goal, the Man in Black appropriates the energy of specially gifted children to beam potent rays of destruction at the tower.

A Manhattan teenager named Jake (Tom Taylor) is the most powerful of these psychically gifted young people. The Man in Black wants to use Jake to destroy all the universes, which are connected by portals.

Nutty? To be sure, but most fantasies resist careful scrutiny, and -- in this case -- themes about sons who lose fathers barely resonate.

Add some creatures with skin that they wear (seams show) and a variety of other tricks that give birth to special effects that fall short of knockout levels, and you've got the idea.

Elba, a fine actor, looks great in a Clint Eastwood-style duster. Sporting an upwardly brushed hair style that might make Christopher Walken envious, McConaughey does his best to convey the eerie villainy of a character who refers to his various abilities in the plural, calling them "magics."

The Man in Black can work simply, as well, killing people by passing a hand over their faces and telling them to "stop breathing."

It seems cavalier to dismiss a movie inspired by eight novels with a short review, but I see no reason to belabor this one or to suggest that I returned from any of the movie's various universes with anything resembling great rewards. Despite lots of huffing and puffing on the part of the filmmakers, The Dark Tower seems far too easy to shrug off.

Sex, nobility and Enlightened values

The Danish drama, A Royal Affair, mixes lofty ideals and basic human desire.

Dramas involving royal families can produce a mixture of titillating detail and -- if we're lucky -- a sense of higher purpose. The Danish drama, A Royal Affair, provides mild satisfaction on both counts by focusing on an affair between the Queen of Denmark (Alicia Vikander) and the physician (Mads Mikkelsen) who became her husband's most trusted adviser.

The story begins when Vikander's Caroline Mathilde, a member of the British nobility, is shipped to Denmark to marry King Christian VII (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard). Willing but sensitive, Caroline Mathilde quickly discovers that her husband is half fop and half lout, a mentally unstable monarch whose interest in whoring exceeds his interest in just about everything else.

Director Nikolaj Arcel eventually softens his portrayal of King Christian, who turns out to be more malleable than expected. He's also lonely, which is where Mikkelsen's Johann Friedrich Sturensee fits in. A German-born rationalist and committed proponent of Enlightenment values, Sturensee becomes the king's physician. His closeness with the king quickly puts him in an advisory capacity, and Sturensee uses his position to push the king toward all manner of reforms -- forbidding torture, ending privilege for nobles and allowing some freedom of the press, to name several.

These reforms don't come without opposition. Accustomed to running the country, ministers of the Danish cabinet have come to regard the king as little more than a royal rubber stamp. Members of the cabinet, as well as representatives of the church, aren't happy about ceding any of their authority to an intermittently deranged king and his German confidant.

So much for the movie's higher ambitions.

Now for the bed-hopping. The queen and Sturensee wind up as lovers. Their affair proves costly to them, but useful to the aggrieved nobles and their allies in the church, two groups that want to put both the king and the peasantry back in their places.

Mikkelsen, who played a Bond villain in Casino Royale, and Vikander, currently on view in Anna Karenina, generate the right amount of swooning chemistry, and, as the king, Folsgaard inspires real pathos. His King Christian can seem as lost as he is out of control.

All of this plays out with the right amount of period-piece authenticity, and A Royal Affair -- Denmark's submission in this year's foreign-language-film Oscar category -- proves that the path toward reform can be paved with both the highest ideals and the most common of desires.