Oh, Americans. For all the times we make things complicated—here at home and around the world—we also can’t help but want things done simply. One glaring, if ultimately trivial, example of this instinct is when one of our own takes a beloved foreign-language film, translates it into Americanese, and in the process flattens out so much of what made the original special. There’s a case of that here at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, I’m afraid, in the form of Downhill (in theaters February 14), an adaptation of the bracing 2014 Swedish film Force Majeure.
I can understand the allure of reinterpreting Ruben Östlund’s dazzling work. It has so much to say about the perils and compromises of family and couplehood; about the sinister frailty of bourgeoise moral codes. It’s a dense yet airy movie, a thrilling comedy that smuggles in an existential tragedy. It’s quite a ride, that story of a marriage collapsing on a luxe ski vacation in the Alps. So why shouldn’t Americans get to tell their own version of it?
To Downhill’s credit, a strong creative team has been assembled to do just that. The Oscar-winning co-writers of The Descendants Jim Rash and Nat Faxon take the helm, adapting the screenplay with Succession wizard Jesse Armstrong. As the couple whose lives are about to be wrenched terribly in the wrong direction, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell step in for Lisa Loven Kongsli and Johannes Kuhnke.
That’s enough notable names to make Downhill something of an event at this festival, another opportunity for Ferrell to work on a more human—and thus more complex—level, and for Louis-Dreyfus to finally stretch her legs and do something new post-Veep. (While still filming that show, she found the time to star in Nicole Holofcener’s exquisite romantic comedy Enough Said.)
For stretches, Downhill delivers on all that promise. Louis-Dreyfus and Ferrell have a credible chemistry as well-meaning, slightly fussy parents of two tween-ish boys who want to have a nice family vacation skiing in the Austrian Alps but also feel the constant pinch of those trips—the way each little negotiation and minor disappointment mars the ideal experience. I like them together on film, and it’s especially satisfying to see Louis-Dreyfus scale back the caustic bite of Selina Meyer without losing the sharpness, the observant attentiveness to a scene’s shifting nuances. What a dark adventure it seems we are about to go on with these two careworn grownups who just trying to have a good time.
But as Downhill gets to the meat of the story, to the real pierce of its inquiry, the movie flinches, or demurs. The thing about Force Majeure is that it’s about so much more than one marriage. It’s a teardown of a whole social order, scary and exciting and bitterly sad all at once. Downhill chooses to keep things a bit more surface than that. The movie is much more literally just about this couple—how their marriage, and by extension their parenthood, might be predicated on some shaky nerves and uncertain convictions. It’s rich enough subject matter, but Downhill treats it all rather timidly. There’s little shock in the movie, and not nearly as much intense discomfort as should be.
Downhill is a clever movie when it could have been profound, had, perhaps, Faxon and Rash been willing—or capable—of digging deeper. That’s frustrating for a lot of reasons, one of which being that Louis-Dreyfus is so clearly willing to go there and further. Her big scene, in which her character explains to some relative strangers how her whole conception of her marriage shifted suddenly in one harrowing moment, is beautifully delivered. Teary and furious, Louis-Drefyus gives the movie its only real feeling of primal catharsis. It’s a terrific bit of acting; I wish the rest of the film rose to meet it.