Mads Mikkelsen has proven a lot in his acting career. He can be a wonderful Bond bad guy. He’s been a key figure in a Star Wars and a Marvel movie. He can take a perfect character and somehow make it better. But can he jazz ballet? Another Round puts another checkbox on Mikkelsen’s list of things he can do that not many others could. Oh yeah, and the movie’s pretty great at times too, and not just because we see a the Mikkelsen….tootsie? Nope, I can do better. The Mikkelsen Meringue. Yes! Nailed it.
Before Mikkelsen’s Martin gets back to his dancing roots, we meet him smack dab in mid life malaise. He’s going through the motions, married to his love Anika (Maria Bonnevie), raising his 2 kids, and blandly teaching high school history. One night, at his colleague/friend Nikolaj’s (Magnus Millang) 40th birthday party, the group of 4: Martin, Nikolaj, Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), and Peter (Lars Ranthe) come alive again reminiscing about their youthful vibrancy and tie that excitement to alcohol consumption. They find a study by a psychologist who says that humans should be slightly intoxicated most of the day to find a perfect balance of social and cognitive function. Excited by these rediscovered feelings, the group of guys start running an experiment to try to achieve that perfect balance without going overboard into alcoholism.
Even though a lot of heavy stuff gets explored in Another Round, most of the movie is just a delight to experience. The movie smartly uses booze as an inroad, something a vast majority of kids have to learn to experience as they grow up. For Martin though, the booze is the catalyst only. What Martin really wants to do is find again that excitement that everyday life can bring. Martin soon finds the kids in his class are more engaged in his lectures, his wife is happier with this new version of him, and he finds more pleasure in little moments that he was simply letting drift by. Thomas Vinterberg finds these beautiful sweet, but little and personal moments in which of the 4 men feel pure ecstasy of living. You can see the years peel away in their manner of speech, dress, facial expressions: these are boys again, eager and waiting for something amazing right around the corner.
But as we all know, you can’t be young wild and free forever. What’s funny at 20 isn’t nearly as funny when you’re 40. Kids, families, jobs, etc depend on you to do the work necessary and maintain a sense of personal responsibility. Vinterberg also finds small little effective parallels to drive home this point for the mid lifers. You see especially how drug use is such a slippery slope here, increasing the risk of the guys’ “experiment” going careening off the rails. Will families stay together? How far will the childless Tommy go into his booze haze? Another Round finds deeper midlife questions too: did you lose too much of yourself that something has broken in your relationships permanently? Will this world of newfound experiences upheave the life you’ve built for yourself? How are the ones you love coping with these changes? The movie goes pretty deep into the melodrama for a good chunk of the third act, before it brings us back from the brink at the end, but if Another Round is anywhere close to reality, looks like our 40s are a reckoning all of us are going to have to prepare for.
Maybe the biggest takeaway from Another Round is communicate. I hope you have someone in your life you can trust. If you do, talk to them, and let them know how you feel, instead of letting yourself wither away. Who knows? Maybe you’ll Mads Mikkelsen-like jazz ballet yourself back into action again. In my case, it would be improv comedy. Don’t worry, I’m not going to subject you all to my terrible attempts to make you laugh here.