Adam's Apples

Anders Thomas Jensen's Adam's Apples (Adams æbler) opened in 2005 and won Best Danish Film at the Robert Awards, along with several Bodil nominations. It is the second film in Jensen's loose cycle with Mads Mikkelsen (after The Green Butchers and before Men & Chicken), all of them about morally compromised men in deeply odd Danish settings. Jensen, who also wrote screenplays for Susanne Bier (Brothers, After the Wedding) and for Lars von Trier, has spent two decades pushing Danish cinema into its most confrontational comic territory.

Adam (Ulrich Thomsen), a stone-faced neo-Nazi just out of prison, is sent to a remote rural parish to do community service under the relentlessly optimistic care of Ivan (Mads Mikkelsen, transparently disturbed beneath his grin), a country priest who refuses to acknowledge that anything bad ever happens to anybody. Ivan suggests Adam set himself a goal: to bake an apple pie from the apples of the church's single tree. Misfortune after misfortune falls on that tree, and Ivan finds a sign of grace in every one.

Under the jokes runs a theological argument about whether faith is a moral virtue or a wilful blindness, and Mikkelsen's serene Ivan is one of the most charming portraits of a man in active denial in modern cinema. Jensen's work with Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas, which began on Flickering Lights (2000) and The Green Butchers (2003) and later took in Men & Chicken and Riders of Justice, is one of the longest-running ensemble partnerships in contemporary Danish cinema, and it puts him alongside Lars von Trier and Susanne Bier in the post-Dogme generation.