SWEET LAND (2005)

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Sweet Land is a very different and refreshing movie to watch in this time when everything has to be explicit. Much is left to our imaginations here, and the result is an effective and touching story about the experience of some Norwegian farmers in Minnesota around 1920, just after World War I has ended.

There is one scene I’d have preferred not to have included, but maybe the film-makers thought that if flatulence was good enough for the likes of Ingmar Bergman, they could get away with some as well.

The movie may be indebted to Ingmar Bergman, in fact. Its photography is stunning, and the characters move in a quiet deliberate way, much as characters often do in Bergman films.

But it is by no means derivative. It speaks with its own voice, showing the strong strain of xenophobia among Americans who tilled the soil at that time–a suspiciousness of “others” that makes it almost impossible for them to accept the arrival of a mail-order bride who happens to be originally from Germany.

Inge, the young woman, speaks no English and very little Norwegian, it immediately becomes clear, and has apparently sought refuge in Norway during the war but did not live there long enough to have been assimilated. Her papers aren’t in order, and the local Minnesota authorities put obstacle after obstacle in the path of the planned marriage between Olaf and herself.

Word has it that all of the Norwegian and German spoken in the film (for which no subtitles are provided) is gibberish. I cannot understand why this dialogue couldn’t have been given in the real languages. Those viewers who understand Norwegian and German must have had a good laugh.

But this is a minor flaw as the rest of the film shines. There is no baloney here. At first I kept wondering what kind of a farm wife the delicate-seeming Inge would be, especially since she is shown doing little but play the victrola she has lugged across the Atlantic (classical music records playing as she’s in the fields) or whether the pastor ever does anything except run his mouth—but, sure enough, when it’s harvest time, Inge is proving herself capable of working hard enough in the field for Olaf grudgingly to tell her she’s done good work, and the pastor has rolled up his sleeves and pitched in with the rest.

This, as I understand it, is the way it was–and still is in many rural areas. Everyone, without exception, is expected to pitch in. The family with nine children would have considered itself blessed with nine pairs of helping hands.

–Which brings up another point that the movie makes in its quiet way: Olaf’s sense of justice and his loyalty to his good friend, the farmer with the nine children. This is the family who have extended themselves to welcome Inge when others were shunning her, and when their farm and all their belongings are about to be auctioned off, Olaf comes to their rescue.

Just how he does this when he lacks the sum needed to bail them out isn’t made clear, and I wish it had been.

A beautiful and very memorable film, with superb performances by Elizabeth Reaser as Inge and Tim Guinee as Olaf.