A good thing, too, because the bare bones of the premise aren’t inherently compelling. Gene Reed (Gabriel Byrne) is a high-school teacher whose famed
Though she’s been dead for three years, Isabelle remains a presence in the family’s life: She haunts Conrad’s daydreams and Gene and Jonah’s memories. We see flashbacks to her getting wounded by a bomb, to the scars on her body. Trier occasionally cuts to footage of interviews with her about her work. In one, she discusses her complicated feelings about going into the homes of families in war-ravaged countries to take pictures of their grief and devastation. “In so-called normal life,” she says, “nobody would go into the house of people who were grieving to photograph them.” But that’s what Trier is doing here. The setting might be a pleasant American suburb, but the film’s title suggests an emotional war zone. That Isabelle on some level probably brought the war back home with her merely strengthens the suggestion.
None of that, however, prepares us for the unusual complexity of Trier’s narrative pirouettes and emotional tangents. He rarely follows one clear story idea. Instead, he indulges the characters’ fixations,
It's hard to be sure. The film unhinges us from the present and lets us lose ourselves a little in the characters' reveries. The resulting fragmentation feels apropos. Trier's people guard their
There’s a funny Vertigo reference when Conrad, toying with his snooping father, collapses before a grave marked “Carlos Valdez” — a nod to the Hitchcock film’s mysterious, long-dead Carlotta Valdez. It seems like a throwaway gag until you realize that Louder Than Bombs, like Vertigo, is also ultimately about obsession and grief, about how, in the wake of trauma, people lose themselves in whirlpools of regret. Again, that’s nothing new, but in finding a narrative and visual style that embodies that obsessiveness, that lost-ness, Trier puts us inside his characters’ heads. What’s more, he does so without it ever feeling forced, or like some kind of authorial dictum. For all the film’s seemingly unusual narrative choices, you emerge from it thinking this story couldn’t properly be told any other way.