Troubled Water (2008)

3 months ago

by Sarah Malone

I first drove into Middlebury, Vermont late on a Sunday afternoon in August. It had been cool up in the mountains, but the valley was wide with sun and there was no breeze, and everyone in the car, loudest of all the friend who’d insisted we needed to gulp down a breath of if not city than at least town air, forgot that wish for the more immediate one of gulping down ice cream.

Shops were locked, windows dark. Even the coffee shop had closed while it could, before students and professors returned, the next week or the week after. After a block of Main Street, the buildings on both sides gave way and, below a stone bridge, a brown river (actually a creek) ran smooth and fast and, just downstream of us, plunged over a waterfall, two stories high at most, but sheer. Maybe I was struck by how the backs of buildings butted out over the falls, or by its roar. Certainly I have leaned unwisely over greater heights. I thought about the Middlebury student who was missing at that time, fruitless police sweeps of the dark water, the stone riverbed, and the boy, falling. In that river, once you’d fallen? Too late. Though the bridge was stone and our steps did not shake it, I had to be off it immediately, onto ground without water (visibly, at any rate) below me.

The northeast U.S. is dotted with such towns. Their hearts—even where all shopping except by tourists has moved out to malls, downtown is still geographically central—have their densest and oldest agglomerations of buildings right alongside wild cascades and precipices. The towns grew up, of course, where rivers’ vertical drops released enough energy for water-powered mills.

It occurs to me now that the impression, passing through these places, is not that they grew up around the water but that the water is perpetually slicing through them.

In Norwegian director Erik Poppe’s 2008 Troubled Water (DeUsynlige), there is a park with a café and bike path, grassy fields, and below, through some slight woods, a babbling river. The river seems easily fordable in the movie’s first frames, but the water turns out to be up to a tall boy’s armpits, with a rapid current, and the river quickens downstream into a full-on cascade.

Two teenage boys, walking through the park, pass listlessly into and out of the café. By the patio tables, a mother has left her son in a stroller while she waits in line.

Returning with hot chocolate, she bumps someone’s elbow and the chocolate splashes across her sweater. In the ladies’ room she tries fruitlessly to rinse the stain away. When she returns to the patio—the sunny scenes in Troubled Water are shot washed-out so that we, too, blink into them—the stroller is gone.

“Did anyone see a little boy?” she calls out.

No one has.

The two teenage boys have taken the stroller. The movie offers no motive; the tall boy, Jan Thomas Hansen, is reticent and passive, the shorter boy alternately sullen and petulant. They seem surprised when a child—a straw-haired boy, Isak—peers from beneath the stroller’s blankets.

“Do something, will you?” The shorter boy shoves Thomas.

“I know you,” Isak says. “You live in the yellow house.”

I don’t think at this point one empathizes with the teenage boys—in their smirks it is evident that they are aware of their wrongdoing, and regard everything, including each other, with such disaffection and disrespect that consequence is nothing to them. But theft has become something else, and as they bicker and shove surely we recognize the fear quickening them: that consequences proceed regardless of intent.

Once you’re in the water, it’s too late.

In creative writing workshops we say character is destiny: when you have someone who is going to behave in certain ways stories take organically shape.

Inevitable, terrifying shape.

Thomas’s impetus is always to push away decision, defer confrontation, huddle. To repent or attempt recompense, apologize, face judgment and retribution, would be too great a swerve, impossible for him. In a movie which, from the title sequence onward, we know will return to water imagery, it is deeply unsettling to have a character so liable to stumble into strong currents be so unable to extricate himself. We get the sense that taking the stroller was not his notion. By not taking Isak back to his mother as soon as he realizes that his crime far exceeds his intent (and did from the first moment), he lets the consequences proceed while denying responsibility.

While the teenage boys argue, Isak slips from the stroller, and instead of running back toward the café, runs into the woods, down toward the river, and disappears over a rocky embankment. The teenagers come upon him, motionless, with blood matting his blonde hair. The short boy violently implores Thomas to “Do something!”

Thomas is the wrong person of whom to demand action. He takes the still little blond body in his arms, wades into the water—deep water, up to his tall armpits—and lets it go.

Troubled Water eludes easy definition. It is not a “scary movie” per se. Thomas is no Hitchcock villain, psychologically profiled with Saul Bass crispness. In the movie’s muted palette (you start to notice after a while that everyone is wearing and has decorated their interiors in the same half-dozen or so colors) and general taciturn languor, punctuated by violence and jarring quick-cuts, it’s reminiscent of Raymond Carver minimalism; only certain words and actions are possible in such a style. It’s a movie in shock, from the disaster of its opening scene, and the disaster that, through its apparently innocuous scenes, we sense looming and necessary.

The movie refuses, as Thomas refuses, to let us into his thinking. We never know his initial motivation for taking the stroller. We never know whether to trust him. When he is paroled (of course he is arrested and convicted), takes a job, meets a woman, seems to be doing all the right things and trying to do all the right things to function unremarkably in society, do we trust him more, or less?

I have known people with Thomas’s gentleness and sudden, heedless roughness (he seems incapable of violence with intent, even as self-defence). In other circumstances, his reticence might have kept him in quiet jobs, made him frustrating to be married to. It would not have made him a murderer. But once the thing is done, can you accept the man who wants to make a life for himself like anyone else? Can you—do you have to—forget what he is capable of? The movie offers no easy answers. Near the end, he says, “God has a purpose for everything, and evil, too?” Though he is calling out someone—a priest—for hypocrisy, it’s hypocrisy he provoked, and his words go through like radiation, damaging.

Isak’s mother, played unnervingly by Trine Dyrholm (whose performance spurred Alec Baldwin to call her the best actress ever), is not let off either. She continues to exhibit the mix of overweening concern (understandably) and poor judgment that gave the boys their opportunity.

The movie proceeds with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, nudged along by a few necessary coincidences that feel inevitable, too—of course [x] would happen… Fate is circumstance, and the bourgeois streets only a few minutes from the water rushing onward. Baptism, abandonment, expiation, death; the water does not differentiate.

The child runs toward danger—a movie trope, but when, as in Troubled Water, the danger is as simple as a slip and fall after leaving the paved path, it retains real terror. Because we remember that fear, don’t we? Nearing the precipice no matter how we knew not to, yielding to that pull? When we could count our years on one hand and towns were so much bigger, and going into them meant passing the rapids or the falls, and the wish to see, touch, possess, be them blotted out all ideas except the new one that worked into it until they were one, that this was a thing to stay well back from, lest we fall.