Release Date: April 13, 2018
Director: Brad Silberling
MPAA Rating: R
Run Time: 90 minutes
One can imagine the veteran, award-caliber actor inside Ben Kingsley was salivating when the script for Brad Silberling’s An Ordinary Man came across his desk. As one of the more prolific acting talents over the age of 70 (this particular film being the fourth production to be made in 2017 that features him), who seemingly says yes to everything, here was an intimate, scaled-down “actor’s piece” where he could indulge in pithy, bitter monologues and bounce his aged, disgruntled sarcasm at a younger scene partner (Hera Hilmar) without the need of makeup, costume or even the strain of moving too much between scenes.
As an added bonus, he would also be given the opportunity to add “Serbian War Criminal” to his eternally expanding acting repertoire of cultural portrayals that memorably win him an Oscar. If you were in the Knight Bachelor’s shoes, you’d be asking yourself what could possibly go wrong?
As it turns out, a lot, when your modest portrait film of a besieged war criminal is as lifeless and devoid of place and meaning as Silbering’s An Ordinary Man is. The simple means that most likely attracted Kingsley to this bottled, disconnected pseudo-thriller of a disgraced general being hidden from extradition by his former Yugoslavian government and rediscovering his lost humanity through his relationship to his put-upon maid, Tanja, are also what makes the film limp in tension and ultimately forgettable.
Stagey is the best descriptor for it because the majority of the film is spent in the single location of the unnamed general’s under-dressed apartment as he hurls “kids these days” complaints at Tanja, his captive audience, while the occasional reference to his non-specific violation of the Geneva Conventions is made.
It affords the actor a hollow sense of gravitas as he is allowed to dominate these scenes with the much younger Hilmar and deliver an honestly solid performance, but to what effect or purpose that performance serves is beyond me because An Ordinary Man is devoid of life on its plain surface and in its shallow sense of drama.
This relationship dynamic between the general and his government-hired servant is poorly defined outside of her being a vessel through which the general can get on a soapbox about his generation. Silberling occasionally flirts with the idea of adding a dimension to it but refuses to make up his mind about which one and instead pays lip service to all of them. The fairly obvious hook of the father-daughter humanizing one is explored in all of one scene, as is the mentor-apprentice one in a prolonged sequence of them cooking and shopping together, but these scenes don’t amount to much when the actors’ chemistry feels stiff and artificial.
Even less convincing and more uncomfortable is the contrived “will they won’t they,” which feels left over from an early draft of the script that should have been better excised. Beyond being the receptacle for the veteran actor’s sarcastic reprimands, poor Hilmar is given little to do in the thankless role opposite Kingsley who gets to strut up and down the impoverished sets of An Ordinary Man, reaching for the fences with every exchange shared between them. Their relationship, such as it is, is as lopsided as the film’s attempts at severity, given its subject matter.
Though technically this singular apartment is set in present day Serbia, the script’s ability to address this and place us there is woefully lacking. What little there is of the cast is without accents; the apartment and street scenes are nondescript and vague, the costumes look inspired from whatever the actors wore to set the day of shooting, and the general’s references to history are indistinct enough as to not arouse suspicion as to where exactly the film takes place.
One would imagine the quotidian busywork of a hunted war criminal from the Soviet Union’s fall would be benefited from a rock-solid sense of place, but the effect here is one of inauthentic nothingness. Silberling’s script makes appeals to recent history, but his drama feels hugely disconnected from it, as if it could have taken place anywhere and the sense of isolation and being trapped his situation is supposed to invoke is lost when we cannot discern where he is or where he is being kept from. The climatic scene where his maid drives him back to the village he hails from could have taken place three nations over for all I cared because it wouldn’t have mattered to how it resonates in the slightest.
Not helping the staginess of Silbering’s presentation is the dull, static cinematography work on display. Favoring the long take may give Kingsley some room to run with the dialogue, but the bland framing of the full body shot in these vacant sets puts a strain on your patience. Given the modest means necessary for the script, the scenario may very well function better on a stage because at the very least it would give an excuse to the lacking sense of place and the standardized visual aesthetic. Sadly as a film is concerned it remains lifeless which does no favors for its attempts at tension later on in its plot.
There was undeniable opportunity here for Kingsley to explore the concept of the tormented war criminal robbed of his freedom equally by his government’s want to protect him from extradition and his guilt over his commitment of atrocities. His performance indicates he was game for much more than Silbering’s film could have offered because beyond two scenes where the impression of him being “haunted” by his wartime actions is teased, the general as a character never evolves to anything resembling substance.
Perhaps, with its priorities reorganized, the effort Kingsley puts into the role could not have been so thoroughly wasted; but as it stands, it seems An Ordinary Man is the lesser of the four films he appeared in last year. Here is hoping he is better in the six or seven that will come this year.
