Adam's Apples

Good Danish black humor.

Adam's Apples is simultaneously a deconstruction and a satire of the Book of Job; the former because it recognizes and highlights the underlying black humor in the biblical text, and the latter because it rightly points out that more than Job’s patience, we should talk about his madness. Danish priest Ivan (Mads Mikkelsen) is both jobian and quixotic (the costume department deserves a pat on the back for making him look, in his priestly garb, like the subject, thought to be Cervantes, of a portrait attributed to Juan de Jáuregui), his insanity the only thing that makes his crappy life bearable. In a stroke of genius, the film explains Ivan’s pollyannish disposition with the pythonesque “Ravashi Syndrome” (“Ravashi was an Indian footballer who lost both feet in a go-karting accident in 1957. In shock from the accident he ran home on the stumps of his legs. His brain blocked out the fact that he had no feet. For two months he went to practice. He kept his midfield position”; “With no feet?”; “It was a bad team. They were in the fifth division or something like that”). Mikkelsen is pitch-perfect as the clueless Ivan, deadpanning his way through outlandish dialogue and somehow making it sound earnest (in one the film’s funniest moments, he tells the titular Adam – a neo-nazi sent to Ivan’s rehabilitation program for parolees –, in reference to a picture of Hitler: “handsome man. Is he your father?”). Ulrich Thomsen is also very effective as the perplexed and ambivalent Adam, of whom Ivan brings out the best and the worst – for example, taking Ivan to the hospital every time Adam beats the crap out of him. In general, Ivan takes more physical punishment than any normal human being could survive, but then we’re not meant to take the movie literally (making it easier to laugh at the character’s sundry hardships and tribulations). Like the biblical book from which it draws inspiration, Adam’s Apples is a parable, though not of the ‘in God we trust’ variety. It'd be tempting to dismiss Ivan as a victim of fanaticism if the filmmakers didn't offset him with the equally fanatical Adam. It’s clear that Ivan's pathological faith is not the answer to life’s problems, but the solution does not lie in Adam’s misanthropic nihilism either. The ideal is to find common ground, which Ivan and Adam do when they visit and comfort a dying old man haunted by the memory of his days as a guard in a concentration camp.