KURT WALLANDER: THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL Tram wires
Cross northern skies
Cut my blue heart in two
My knuckles bleed
Down the tattered street On a door that shouldn't be In front of me
Lyric by Emily Barker from "Nostalgia", the theme song for Wallander
Television used to be a wasteland of melodrama and situation comedies, but in the past 10 years has become more of a home for excellent dramas than film, which far too often seems to get caught up in fads like 3D and spectacular special effects to draw in younger viewers. An example of great television drama is the BBC series "Wallander", starring Kenneth Branagh, who is often and deservedly compared to Laurence Olivier. 9 of these 90 minute police dramas have been made over the past 6 years, based on the best-selling mystery novels by Swedish author Henning Mankell; 3 more are currently being made and will be the final episodes in the series.
Branagh plays Kurt Wallander as a brooding, melancholic, burned out Police Inspector, whose moods match the barren Swedish landscape where the series has been filmed. Wallander is an obsessive workaholic who gets way too involved in his grisly work investigating homicides; his first wife has divorced him and moved on, and his grown daughter eventually stops speaking to him because his devotion to his work just leaves too little room for anyone who cares about him. When he moves in with a new girlfriend in a later episode, he immediately discovers a buried skeleton on the property and jumps on a ferry going over to Poland without even telephoning the girlfriend; he always expresses remorse, however, and we root for Wallander despite his getting lost in the fog of his inner demons.
Branagh said in an interview that he thinks the public has "great affection towards the character. There is no machismo swagger about him. He has this open-wound quality, and he takes all of these crimes personally. He has a sense of quiet, but intense moral outrage. He's appalled and surprised when people commit these terrible acts of cruelty, and he has an empathy for the victim that is almost dangerous to him."
In episode 2, his daughter has signed him up for an online dating service; his date observes that he doesn't seem able to create any professional distance between himself and his work as he talks about two young people who have been brutally murdered: Ella: Shouldn't you try to remember the good that you do? The bigger picture? Kurt: I don't really think there is a bigger picture. This is where we live. These are our lives, and they are fragile, and precarious. And miraculous. They're all we have. And for Sonya, and for Jonas, it doesn't really seem ..fair.
Police inspectors like Wallander see the dark side of the human experience; a 15 year old girl douses herself with gasoline and sets herself on fire in front of him; he sees and has to smell bloated, decomposing corpses, a body that has been put through a pulp shredder, and a corpse stolen from the coroner that has had its hands and feet hacked off before being dumped into the ocean. And the distraught family members of the perpetrators and the victims take out their anger on Wallander. It truly is the dark night of the soul, and one wonders why anyone would be willing to do a job like this day after day, year after year. Wallender himself says at one point that he has "been dead inside."
He is a man in crisis, as a profiler observes and in one both pathetic and poignant bit of dialogue, he says that maybe he needs to get out . "raise some carrots, and a few pigs; yes .a few pigs."
The production values for this series are outstanding; the cinematography of this overcast topography perfectly matches the glumness of the life that Wallander leads. The music is haunting, and many of the acting performances are just outstanding. At the center of it all is Branagh himself, who does the best acting I have ever seen him do in this series, and that is really saying something.
Cross northern skies
Cut my blue heart in two
My knuckles bleed
Down the tattered street On a door that shouldn't be In front of me
Lyric by Emily Barker from "Nostalgia", the theme song for Wallander
Television used to be a wasteland of melodrama and situation comedies, but in the past 10 years has become more of a home for excellent dramas than film, which far too often seems to get caught up in fads like 3D and spectacular special effects to draw in younger viewers. An example of great television drama is the BBC series "Wallander", starring Kenneth Branagh, who is often and deservedly compared to Laurence Olivier. 9 of these 90 minute police dramas have been made over the past 6 years, based on the best-selling mystery novels by Swedish author Henning Mankell; 3 more are currently being made and will be the final episodes in the series.
Branagh plays Kurt Wallander as a brooding, melancholic, burned out Police Inspector, whose moods match the barren Swedish landscape where the series has been filmed. Wallander is an obsessive workaholic who gets way too involved in his grisly work investigating homicides; his first wife has divorced him and moved on, and his grown daughter eventually stops speaking to him because his devotion to his work just leaves too little room for anyone who cares about him. When he moves in with a new girlfriend in a later episode, he immediately discovers a buried skeleton on the property and jumps on a ferry going over to Poland without even telephoning the girlfriend; he always expresses remorse, however, and we root for Wallander despite his getting lost in the fog of his inner demons.
Branagh said in an interview that he thinks the public has "great affection towards the character. There is no machismo swagger about him. He has this open-wound quality, and he takes all of these crimes personally. He has a sense of quiet, but intense moral outrage. He's appalled and surprised when people commit these terrible acts of cruelty, and he has an empathy for the victim that is almost dangerous to him."
In episode 2, his daughter has signed him up for an online dating service; his date observes that he doesn't seem able to create any professional distance between himself and his work as he talks about two young people who have been brutally murdered: Ella: Shouldn't you try to remember the good that you do? The bigger picture? Kurt: I don't really think there is a bigger picture. This is where we live. These are our lives, and they are fragile, and precarious. And miraculous. They're all we have. And for Sonya, and for Jonas, it doesn't really seem ..fair.
Police inspectors like Wallander see the dark side of the human experience; a 15 year old girl douses herself with gasoline and sets herself on fire in front of him; he sees and has to smell bloated, decomposing corpses, a body that has been put through a pulp shredder, and a corpse stolen from the coroner that has had its hands and feet hacked off before being dumped into the ocean. And the distraught family members of the perpetrators and the victims take out their anger on Wallander. It truly is the dark night of the soul, and one wonders why anyone would be willing to do a job like this day after day, year after year. Wallender himself says at one point that he has "been dead inside."
He is a man in crisis, as a profiler observes and in one both pathetic and poignant bit of dialogue, he says that maybe he needs to get out . "raise some carrots, and a few pigs; yes .a few pigs."
The production values for this series are outstanding; the cinematography of this overcast topography perfectly matches the glumness of the life that Wallander leads. The music is haunting, and many of the acting performances are just outstanding. At the center of it all is Branagh himself, who does the best acting I have ever seen him do in this series, and that is really saying something.