‘Growth Of The Soil’ San Sebastian Review: Hans Petter Moland’s Sturdy Epic Follows Two Norwegian Homesteaders Building Paradise From Scratch, Then Watching Progress Tear It Apart

After a pair of action movies with Liam Neeson, veteran Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland heads back to his native country to tackle a decidedly tricky assignment: adapting Growth of the Soil, the celebrated novel Knut Hamsun published in 1917 and which, three years later, helped the controversial author win the Nobel Prize in Literature. It’s an epic tale about building a family and a home in the middle of nowhere, and about how, over the decades, that little world gets bent out of shape by its contact with «civilization.» The book was hugely celebrated in its day, then slid in prestige alongside Hamsun’s own fall from grace over his support for Nazism. Today, unfortunately, with a similar spirit stirring again in certain corners of the world, it’s hard to see the work as anything other than a celebration of individualism at all costs.

Across a full 150 minutes that could easily have been fewer, Moland generally does a good job charting the slow, steady growth and eventual cracking of a family assembled, quite literally, out of nothing. The story opens with Isak (Herbert Nordrum, known for The Worst Person in the World), a solitary man who seems lost in the mountains of northern Norway and who makes camp in a spot where, despite the snowfall, planting is possible. He barely scrapes by while piecing together a minimal, precarious shelter against the wind and snow. It’s there that he crosses paths with a woman named Inger (Asta Kamma August, daughter of Bille and Pernilla August), another lonely soul adrift, who has a cleft lip and ends up staying to live with him in that tiny refuge.

Time passes, the seasons turn, something like affection takes hold and soon, without much talking (this has to be the couple with the least dialogue between them in the history of sound cinema), Isak and Inger are together. They have a son, then another, bring home a cow, dig in to build a house and, in barely a decade or so, have carved out a not-so-small, almost paradisiacal corner of the world where there once seemed to be nothing at all. But paradise soon starts to spoil. The first thing to arrive is «the State,» embodied in a local official who wants to tax them for making use of a plot of state-owned land. Then comes a complicated event within the family, one better left unspoiled here, that begins to put distance, and different paths, between Isak and Inger.

Amid the personal conflicts running through the film, what Growth of the Soil really narrates is how that worked land, that world the couple built from scratch, soon begins to connect with civilization in fraught ways: it fills up with newcomers chasing fortune and with officials angling for some profit or advantage, and it collides with a series of cultural shifts (Isak and Inger are initially illiterate) that open a deep internal rift within the couple. On one side stands the coarser, primitivist, «libertarian» Isak, who wants nothing to do with anyone or anything; on the other, the more gregarious Inger, who is looking to connect a little more with the rest of the world.

The film, which will represent Norway at this year’s Oscars, changes a handful of specific circumstances from the novel but still presents itself as a celebration of individual effort and achievement, and as a critique of any attempt at socialization, contact with the outside world or even the most basic kind of progress. The arrival of officials who enforce unthinkable laws and collect taxes seen as unjust is what sets the rot in motion. According to the film, once the state sticks its nose in, all family harmony begins to fall apart. And Moland doesn’t budge from the stance of Hamsun’s original: here, as on the page, the patriarch, however intellectually rough he may seem, is always right.

Moland manages to move the story along at a measured but precise pace, one that, despite its length and apparent slowness, never turns overly thick. He has a well-trained muscle as a thriller storyteller, and it shows in a film that, for all its trappings as a historical epic drama, always moves with a certain harmony. In fact, for a movie with very little dialogue and a limited number of relevant characters over two and a half hours, it feels remarkably light. Part of the dramatic backbone comes from the complex relationship that grows between the two leads, and from the chemistry of two actors who already shared the marquee in the very different comedy The Hypnosis.

What nobody tried to update, though, was the original premise of Growth of the Soil, a text that functions as a manifesto for the most extreme forms of individualism, written in an era that had no idea what those extremes would eventually bring about in the world. This celebration of the self-made man, who builds everything without help from anyone and whose existence the state comes along to ruin, could well be the first libertarian manifesto in cinema, one that applies as much to its historical reading as, with minimal differences, to the most modern ones.