Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

For me to be reviewing this film is a little bit like Dick Cheney reviewing Fahrenheit 9/11. It’s difficult to look past one’s fundamental disagreements with the message of a film to evaluate matters of cinematic technique. Fortunately, I’ve had previous opportunities to develop an appreciation for Dreyer’s skills as a filmmaker, which helps in identifying those same strengths at work here. I have also previously commented that Dreyer films are sometimes betrayed by script weakness (see my review of Day of Wrath). With Ordet, his film is more fundamentally betrayed by sappy piety and grotesquely dishonest pretense that no amount of austere earnestness can disguise. Dreyer’s intent, here, is to deliver a sales pitch for spirituality. Despite some beautiful cinematic language, his efforts to persuade get bogged down, in the end, by the silliness of his brand of occult mysticism and fundamentalist mumbo-jumbo that few viewers will stomach with equanimity.

Historical Background: Dreyer was born in 1889 as the illegitimate child of a Swedish housekeeper, who later died during another pregnancy from an ill-conceived abortion attempt. After bouncing among a few foster homes, Dreyer was adopted by a Danish family and given a strict puritan upbringing. Dreyer was an unrelenting critic of organized religion and religiosity but was himself devoutly spiritual and religious. He had a deeply held faith in God and his brand of Christian belief envisioned God as incarnate throughout the material realm. For Dreyer, the spiritual and material domains were inextricably interwoven and the human body simply the agency by which the human spirit expresses itself in the material world. Dreyer shared with Kierkegaard a distrust for rational thought. Ordet, which means “The Word”, can be understood as pursuing the agenda articulated by Kierkegaard in his Journals: it is “intelligence and nothing else that had to be opposed.” Ordet was based on a famous play by Kaj Munk, a Danish pastor who was murdered by the Nazis in 1944.

The Story: The story takes place in 1925 on a rural Danish farm. The family patriarch, Morten Borgen (Henrik Malberg) is a widower with three sons. Morton is a staunch believer and belongs to a sect that subscribes to a “bright, joyful kind of Christianity.” He is suffering something of a crisis of faith, however, blaming himself for his second son’s insanity: “It wasn’t God’s fault but my own. If I’d prayed with faith the miracle would have happened. But I prayed because it was worth trying.”

Morten’s eldest son, Mikkel Borgen (Emil Hass Christensen), is married to Inger (Birgitte Federspiel), has two young daughters, Maren (Ann Elisabeth Rud) and Lilleinger (Susanne Rud), and a third child on the way. Mikkel is an agnostic, telling his wife that he doesn’t even have faith in faith. By contrast, Inger’s faith is simple, honest, and unshakeble. She accepts Mikkel as he is, reminding him that he is a good-hearted person, which is more important.

Middle son Johannes (Preben Leerdorff-Rye) is quite insane and believes himself to be the incarnation of Jesus Christ. He had once been a promising scholar, had studied for the ministry, but had gone mad reading Soren Kierkegaard! (This last point was obviously intended as a laugh line. Scandinavian audiences typically crack up when it is delivered.) Johannes has an appearance that could be imagined by visualizing a cross between Sean Penn and depictions of Jesus. Johannes does a pretty good job of sounding a lot like a prophet: “I am a mason, I build houses but people refuse to live in them. They want to build for themselves. They want to, but they cannot. And so they live, some in unfinished shacks, others in ruins.”

The youngest son, Anders, is smitten with Anne (Gerda Nielsen), the daughter of the tailor, Peter Skraedder (Ejner Federspiel) and his wife Kirsten (Sylvia Eckhausen). There is a major complication, however. Morten Borgen and Peter Skraedder disagree adamantly on doctrinal matters and belong to different sects. The tailor heads a bible study group that has a more fundamentalist bent that emphasizes being born again as the necessity for escaping damnation, but which Morten describes as dour-faced religion. During the first third of the film, it seems that the obstacles confronting Anders and Anne getting together will be the main focus of the film. Anders enlists the aid of his brother, Mikkel, and, especially, his sister-in-law, Inger, in pleading his case to his own father while he himself will speak to Anne’s father. Inger applies her most delicate touch in trying to coax Morten toward a more accepting stance, plying him with coffee and sweet cakes and offering him his favorite eel dinner if he’ll relent. Even the “guarantee” that her next born will be a grandson for Morten fails to elicit the requisite cooperation. What does the trick, however, is when Anders returns with the news that he was rejected by Peter Skraedder as not good enough for his daughter. “Not good enough”, it seems, means not belonging to the same sect. The idea that his son is not good enough for Peter Skraedder’s daughter excites Morten’s sense of pride and he becomes determined to bring about the marriage after all.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS! SKIP TO THE THEMES SECTION IF YOU LIKE!

The story takes a ninety-degree turn, however, when Inger is endangered by premature labor and a fetal breach position. The midwife, the physician, and the entire family are gathered in a life-and-death struggle. The baby, which was a boy, is lost early on. Inger is in grave danger, then seemingly emerges from it into a restful sleep, only to die suddenly in her sleep. Johannes is able to see Death’s arrival, complete with scythe, both when the baby dies and, later, Inger. Johannes has promised his nieces that they need not worry; he will bring their mother back to life after she dies.

As if anything more were needed to add to this family’s distress, Johannes disappears and is nowhere to be found. Mikkel and Morten struggle with the pain of Inger’s death, each in his own way and the Pastor (Ove Rud) stops by to offer comfort. Peter Skraedder, meanwhile, has been reading over some familiar Bible passages, reminding himself to turn the other cheek and to befriend his neighbor before going to church. He shows up at Inger’s wake to offer his daughter as her “replacement” at Borgen Farm – as Anders’s wife. This is where the film should have ended – with the “poetic” resurrection of Inger in the form of Anne.

Dreyer, however, was intent on a more emphatic (if ridiculous) justification of faith. Johannes now shows up at the wake, somehow having regained his sanity – evidenced by the fact that he now at least speaks coherently. He derides the assembled family for not having had the courage to ask God for a miracle – to return Inger to them alive. All are skeptical and/or insulted, except for Maren, who trustingly urges Johannes to get on with it. He invokes the name of Jesus Christ and, soon, a hand duly twitches, the eyes open, Inger and Mikkel embrace, and Mikkel, ipso facto, gains faith.

Themes: Clearly, what Dreyer has in mind in this film is a testament to the power of faith. Dreyer makes a clear distinction between real faith and mere going-through-the-motions religious affiliation. Among the characters, we have a full array of philosophical positions vis a vis faith. Mikkel is an agnostic while the physician is, apparently, a non-believer. Morten and the Pastor are wedded to ordinary, practical, organized Christianity. They are believers but focused mainly on daily living, human caring and involvement, and materialism. Peter Skraedder and his flock are more thoroughly occupied with their religious convictions, but also overly focused on fine points of doctrine. Johannes epitomizes an extreme level of spirituality but to an extent that leaves him divorced from the material world and the practicalities of human interactions. Inger, on the other hand, is Dreyer’s ideal integration of transcendent spirituality and its incarnation in the material world. The eldest daughter of Mikkel and Inger, Maren, is also special. She exhibits the purity of innocent faith that only a child can possess and her faith and her uncle’s bring about the anticipated miracle. Those who had possessed only shallow faith are appropriately chastened while Mikkel is unequivocally converted. Never mind that after several days of death Inger’s brain cells would be thoroughly denatured. Never mind that this fabricated miracle bears absolutely no relationship to reality.

Like Mikkel, I have neither faith nor faith in faith. I believe in the worth of developing one’s critical thinking skills and in helping others develop such skills, through education. Faith is the diametrical opposite of critical thinking skills. One should be infinitely suspicious of a philosophical viewpoint or doctrine that claims that you ought to subscribe to that viewpoint as an act of faith. One ought to be doubly suspicious if that viewpoint or doctrine adds unverifiable claims of positive incentives that ensue from that act of faith and negative incentives that accrue to those who fail to develop faith in their doctrine. These are the worst kind of fallacious arguments, demeaning even to a used-car salesman. Faith as an epistemology is bound to fail in the vast majority of instances. Even if one faith-demanding doctrine were (miraculously) The Truth, all the others would still proliferate through misplaced faith. By contrast, critical thinking with continuous refinement and revision of one’s worldview by rational thought provides a credible route to enlightenment. Mikkel, lacking faith but also lacking an alternative, internalized worldview, was vulnerable to conversion, especially when the scriptwriters (and author of the original source material) had so little integrity as to throw in a gratuitous and impossible miracle. The uneducated of the world provide an endless stream of victims for purveyors of superstitious thinking and where there are potential victims, there will always be religious hucksters.

Fortunately, Ordet is relatively harmless propaganda as religious propaganda goes. The film is so ponderously slow and so weighted down by its artiness, that no one other than an intellectual film-geek, a philosopher, or a person already steeped in religious doctrine would sit through it. The viewpoints of such people are already typically solidified into something approximating concrete and are unlikely to be swayed by Dreyer’s earnest effort. The vulnerable, unwashed masses with underdeveloped personal philosophies will also, fortunately, have no patience for Ordet. Dreyer has pretty much guaranteed by his style that no one in need of a “spiritual” lesson will attend to his.

Production Values: Dreyer’s style here in Ordet is recognizably his and not all that different than what we’ve all come to admire in Passion of Joan of Arc (1927), Vampyr (1932), and Day of Wrath (1943). First and foremost is the gorgeous high-contrast black-and-white photography with skillful use of lighting. Many of the scenes are shot in a single take, facilitated by stagnant shots and slow, graceful pans. Sometimes the camera captures an empty space before the characters walk into it, suggesting the timelessness and nothingness of eternity.

Other than thematic concerns, the chief complaint launched against this film is its slowness. I think that would be an issue for many viewers. I’ve seen enough slow films to have gotten used to it and it posed no difficulty for me. From an artistic point of view, the slow pace is entirely appropriate. It confers a kind of weightiness to the proceedings, which would certainly be appropriate if one subscribes to the notion that one is going to be witness to an impending miracle. If, on the other hand, you don’t buy the miraculous ending, it all seems too much like a magician who has over-hyped a trick that turns into a bust.

The performances are all excellent, but Birgitte Federspiel, as Inger, most of all. She provides the perfect blend between spirituality and human compassion and warmth. Some thirty-plus years later she appeared in Babette’s Feast (1987). Preben Leerdorff-Rye, who played Johannes, previously appeared for Dreyer in Day of Wrath (1943). Otherwise, none of the cast have other credits in top level films.

Bottom-Line: It’s hard to know what to say about a film that advocates faith, the more all-encompassing the better, and which suggests that if you’ve enough faith to appear completely insane to the secular world around you, you can even bring your relatives back to life after they’ve been dead for several days. Some reviewers view that as a positive message, applauding Dreyer because his movies “all insist that the supernatural is real and ever present.” Oddly, Dreyer’s own film Day of Wrath (not to mention the news almost every day) demonstrates the horrors brought about by supernatural and superstitious mentality. Still, there’s no denying Dreyer’s mastery of film making technique, even when subverted to the work of religious propaganda. I give this film five stars for stylistic elements and minus one for message for a net rating of two stars. Ordet is in Danish with English subtitles and has a running time of 125 minutes.

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age