The Celebration: How Long Can This Go On?

In the spring of 1998, when The Celebration premiered, it was so unusual to see vulnerable men grappling with trauma on-screen—let alone articulating that struggle—that Thomas Vinterberg’s second feature seemed like a broadcast from some alien civilization. Seeing it in the theater, I felt as if I’d been slugged in the gut. Today, even in a wider culture that has grown more open to discussions of mental-health struggles, it’s still a film that can drop your jaw and leave you breathless. One way to appreciate The Celebration now is as a rare example in contemporary cinema of a great male-centered melodrama, one in which a young man’s public reckoning with his own trauma cuts through the very fabric of white Western culture, where power is often predicated on the keeping up of appearances. Aesthetically, one may not immediately think of melodrama, an antirealist mode known in part for its expressionistic flourishes, when considering the grubby, rough-hewn texture and style of The Celebration. Vinterberg’s film, after all, kick-started Dogme 95, a cinematic movement premised on aggressive authenticity. But—setting aside melodrama’s historical association with women and maternal sacrifice—many of the genre’s recurrent narrative and ideological elements are identifiable here: the dramatization of emotional anguish, the simultaneous triumph of morality and corruption of innocence, the centrality of class, the constraints of familial legacies, the suffocation of domesticity.

Watching the film, one is as walloped by the unabashedly theatrical manner with which Vinterberg divulges his taboo subject as by the narrative revelations themselves. There was always a grandstanding theatricality to Dogme 95, though: after all, the movement’s manifesto—of which Vinterberg and Lars von Trier were the writers and first signatories; other filmmakers, including Kristian Levring and Lone Scherfig and the American enfant terrible Harmony Korine, came aboard later—turned out to have been an act of instant self-mythologization for its brash young Danish originators. Dogme 95 was about putting cinematic rules in place ahead of the coming digital revolution, which promised to “democratize” filmmaking. The strictures that the movement laid out implied a need to keep the truthfulness of cinema intact: the movies made within them should be not merely reflective of reality but mired in it, all the better to rid cinema of the “bourgeois romanticism” of the concept of the auteur, according to the manifesto. The rules were so draconian that they seemed to intentionally flirt with corniness: no artificial lighting, no music on the soundtrack, no camera dollies or cranes (indeed, no placing of the camera anywhere but in the hands of its operator), no props brought in from outside the shooting location. (Vinterberg claimed in a 2015 interview that the document took “half an hour to write.”) Any deviation from these “simple” restrictions would inherently cast suspicion on the authenticity of the result. But by de-emphasizing so many cinematic conventions, these films would quite naturally still call attention to themselves as creations, just with swagger and flourish recast as spareness and rigidity. Because The Celebration foregrounds its own artificiality in this way, it is perhaps not so counterintuitive after all to invoke melodrama when discussing it.

With so many cinematic techniques prohibited in production and postproduction, Dogme 95 films would inevitably focus on their scripts, the camera simply following actors through the points of the plot without atmosphere-enhancing cutaways or establishing shots. The first of the more than thirty films released under the Dogme 95 banner between 1998 and 2005, The Celebration would also be the most enduringly successful with critics. However, I’d venture that its acclaim is due not to the novelty of the nascent movement but to the fact that Vinterberg’s skill as a dramatist is evident in every frame. He understood precisely what had to be done to keep audiences in the palm of his hand.

Although The Celebration was his international breakthrough, Vinterberg, only twenty-nine at the time of its release, was already a filmmaker who demonstrated both a keen interest in people reckoning with emotional trauma and an energetic technical style. A 1993 graduate of Denmark’s National Film School (which by then already counted von Trier, Scherfig, Bille August, and Susanne Bier among its alumni), Vinterberg first garnered festival acclaim with two shorts: his graduate thesis, Last Round, in which a young man’s reckless behavior is revealed as a front for his anxiety over a cancer diagnosis, and The Boy Who Walked Backwards (1995), about a nine-year-old boy’s difficulty coping with the accidental death of his older brother. His first feature, The Biggest Heroes (1996), while more of a lark than The Celebration, is in retrospect a crucial warm-up for that film—not only because it shares three of The Celebration’s principal actors but also because, in its road-movie, adventure-comedy template, it represents just the kind of conventional genre plotting and formal filmmaking that Dogme 95 would be created in part to help him unlearn.

“Vinterberg pushes viewers into a realm of true discomfort, turning us into spectators at the world’s worst family reunion.”

Like Vinterberg’s early short films, The Celebration is about the tough and terrible things that we are not supposed to talk about in “proper” society. Melodrama, with its propensity for emotional revelation, provides an opportunity for Vinterberg to push viewers into a realm of true discomfort, turning us into spectators at the world’s worst family reunion. The film pivots on a device that is inherently theatrical: a centerpiece dinner at which an audience of guests sits mostly still for an escalating series of familial revelations. At the middle of the maelstrom is Christian (Ulrich Thomsen), the cherubic favored son of steel magnate Helge (Henning Moritzen), whose sixtieth birthday provides the reason for the celebration. The shocking events that follow do not happen to our complicated hero; they are of his doing. When it is Christian’s turn to rise and pay tribute to his beaming papa, he boasts that he has two speeches prepared, presenting green and yellow pieces of folded paper and asking his father to choose. The selected one, he reveals, has a theme: “home truths.” The relaxed murmurs of the dinner crowd indicate an expectation of pleasantries about the past. Christian has something quite different up his sleeve. What begins as a casually delivered remembrance about childhood bath time swerves into a recollection of his father’s sexual abuse of him and his twin sister, Linda. It is not lost on anyone in the room that, mere months ago, Linda committed suicide. (Vinterberg has said he didn’t tell the extras on set what was coming, as the speech is so scandalous that he was scared they would leave.)

Christian’s words hit with the force of a hurricane. There’s momentary shock; there are awkward laughs, an errant clap. Yet another speaker stands to deliver another speech, eager to get rid of the bad taste left from Christian’s. Christian sits; his blank expression, which we may have interpreted earlier as stoicism, now reads as despair. It becomes gradually clear that the show will go on, that Christian’s horrific disclosure has not abated the impulse to honor Helge. Christian’s frighteningly well-put-together mother, Else (Birthe Neumann), forces an awkward smile, while the docile guests valiantly struggle to return to the festivities—and besides, there’s all this good food that shouldn’t go to waste. No Buñuelian force is keeping them hostage in this dining room other than the almost supernaturally compelling bourgeois obligation to smile through it all.

The basic premise of The Celebration—that one takes a terrifying risk in speaking truth to power, in this case even in one’s own childhood dining room—is so thunderously resonant that it’s easy to overlook the skill and wily misdirection with which Vinterberg has gotten us to this dramatic turning point. As the film begins, Christian walks down a seemingly endless stretch of sun-dappled country road, en route to the family mansion; he has landed safe and sound from Paris, as he tells someone on a clunky cell phone. Vinterberg cuts from a long shot to a disorienting, fish-eye close-up of Christian as he takes a gander at the perfectly blue sky and muses aloud about moving back home, before bad reception ends the call. Watched years later, the first scene can’t help but be defined by its technologies, not just the banana-size nineties cell phone in Christian’s hand but also the degraded-looking image itself: the film was shot on an early mini-digital-video camera, the Sony PC7, which cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (who’d win an Oscar a decade later for shooting Slumdog Millionaire) chose for its light weight and adaptability to Dogme standards. Everything about these introductory moments implies a certain casual simplicity of intent, and with no insinuating score or ominous cutaways, we have only the actor’s somewhat carefree words and mannerisms to establish the tone.

Vinterberg sets the story up so that the most plausible source for any drama to come would seem to be one of Christian’s two surviving siblings—each of whom screeches into the film like a disheveled dervish. Michael (Thomas Bo Larsen, who had been working with Vinterberg since Last Round), the family’s drunken, loudmouthed black sheep, spots Christian on the side of the road while driving in; he gives his brother a lift, but the seemingly kind gesture comes at the misfortune of Michael’s long-suffering wife and kids, whom he kicks out of the car and forces to walk the rest of the way. Rounding out the trio, Helene (Paprika Steen) follows on their heels, first seen lighting up a joint in the back of a car and offering the driver her phone number if he picks up the pace (he gamely obliges). With a brother and sister like these, it’s difficult to imagine Christian as the boat-rocker. Vinterberg further puts us off the scent by implying a potential redemption narrative between Michael and his father: before the evening’s festivities begin, Helge dangles the promise of entry into his Freemason society to Michael, who sees such an association as a way of getting back into the old man’s good graces.

Once the family is at the house, the handheld video aesthetic begins to register as claustrophobic, its grunginess at meaningful odds with the trappings of privilege. Whereas most films set amid the lives of rich families choose to revel in the visual gloss of wealth, Vinterberg treats the family’s labyrinthine manse as little more than a shabby inconvenience, its exteriors not worthy of awe-inspiring shots, its interiors barely spacious enough for Dod Mantle’s small camera, which occasionally gets knocked around by bustling servers prepping for the party—a prime example of the way that the film’s ostensible naturalism evokes its constructedness (in another scene, there’s a visible boom mic). And even in these early scenes, as the siblings situate themselves in their rooms for the night, the new-media aesthetic cannot detract from Vinterberg’s flair for traditional dramatic fireworks: Michael isn’t just abusive and demeaning to his wife, Mette (Helle Dolleris), he’s a cartoon lout, and Mette gives as good as she gets. Helene reveals that she’s not just haunted by the memory of the deceased Linda; she believes her sister’s ghost literally haunts the premises. Christian, meanwhile, bides his time, even sitting for a seemingly friendly chat with his father, who makes jokes and asks his eldest to consider moving back home. Helge also casually asks if Christian will say a few words about Linda tonight. Don’t worry, Christian assures him, he has already written something.

The figure of the wealthy patriarch exerting power over his children was a mainstay of melodramatic literature, theater, and cinema throughout the twentieth century (as it continues to be today); he’s a symbol of unbounded capitalism and domestic conservatism. At some point, he is finally confronted by his offspring so that they can give vent to their psychological suffering, a reapplication of the King Lear template for Sigmund Freud’s century that is visible in antipatriarchal melodramatic films as diverse, rich, and shocking as Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy, Richard Brooks’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass, Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, and Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres. Rarely in such dramas, however, is there a no-turning-back moment like the truth-telling that anchors The Celebration. After Christian’s first speech leaves his audience nervous and dumbstruck, he returns to the scene of the crime and doubles down with a follow-up toast: “Here’s to the man who killed my sister!”

As with any dramatic portrayal of cloistered privilege, the grotesquerie here is put into sharper relief by the presence of an outsider. Vinterberg, diagnosing this family’s incestuous monstrousness as a matter of whiteness as much as of power and money, introduces a crucial such character halfway through The Celebration. Helene’s Black American boyfriend, Gbatokai (Gbatokai Dakinah), arrives by taxi late to the proceedings, just in time to catch Christian’s second speech. As soon as he pulls into the driveway, though, Gbatokai is accosted by Michael, who hurls racist invective at him, prompting an infuriated Helene to call her brother a “Nazi bastard”; later, the entire dining room will serenade Gbatokai, at Michael’s bidding, with an astonishingly racist Danish folk song. In the face of such a litany of violent humiliations, a viewer may rightly wonder why Gbatokai doesn’t just get out of this den of white horrors, yet the fact that he stays at the side of the embarrassed Helene is in keeping with the film’s mounting, Exterminating Angel–like absurdity. And Dakinah’s looks of bemusement at the spectacle of soul-sick European white supremacy, as well as his immediate identification with Christian, an outsider of a different sort, constitute some of the film’s most human, and most relief-providing, moments.

By film’s end, Helge has been dethroned. Yet considering what those in this kingdom have allowed to go on for so many years, what morality remains? Is there any hope for happiness? If any thread connects Vinterberg’s varied work, it’s this kind of ambivalence. Again and again, the director, who was raised in a Danish commune between the ages of seven and nineteen, has returned to matters of collective anxiety, whether in families, communities, or workplaces. In The Hunt (2012), a mild-mannered elementary school teacher stands up to his town after a shattering, untrue accusation of child molestation. In the somewhat autobiographical The Commune (2016), an idealistically motivated collective must contend with individual recklessness. And in the Oscar-winning Another Round (2020), a quartet of high school teachers turn to excessive drinking in an attempt to drown out the headaches of middle age. In all cases, Vinterberg supplies happy endings that somehow withhold satisfaction, acknowledgments that irrevocable damage has been done.

In The Celebration, this is most acute. The morning after, as the bleary-eyed family and guests gather in the dining room, Helge attempts to give a conciliatory, self-lacerating speech that is meant to function as a tacit confession of his crimes. Though he sits back down at the head of the table, a calm Michael, in sunglasses, rises and approaches his father, matter-of-factly ejecting him from the room “so we can eat our breakfast.” Helge concedes defeat and exits. Against a final close-up of Christian, expressionless, looking offscreen, we hear the surrounding chatter rise to an echoey din before an abrupt cut to the credits. For Christian, isolated in the frame, trauma is not so easily overcome, while those around him sound eager to return to business as usual. The effect is overwhelming: the final indignity from a family that has so long turned a blind eye. As with all great melodrama, there is catharsis here, but it seems clear it is just a temporary balm for wounds that may never heal.

The Celebration: How Long Can This Go On?

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