Another Round (2020)
10/10
“To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems!”
—Homer Simpson
The opening scene of Another Round (original Danish title Druk, “binge drinking”) depicts students engaged in a drinking game known as the Lake Race, which involves teams running around a lake and chugging beers at various intervals, with points deducted for things like vomiting. We see students in the Lake Race getting hammered, then partying on a subway train and making trouble for ticket inspectors. They’re falling down, sloppy drunk, singing loudly, causing trouble, basically what you would expect. We tend to more or less accept such binge drinking experiences as a rite of passage for young adults, in part due to the novelty factor. When people are first old enough to drink, they’re more likely to overindulge. The negative consequences of excessive drinking have yet to catch up with them.
However, those who are older don’t necessarily know better. One of the running themes of Another Round is how alcohol affects different people in different ways. The film, directed by Thomas Vinterberg from a script he co-write with Tobias Lindholm, tells the story of four teachers at a secondary school in Copenhagen, who learn (or re-learn) that lesson in the course of an unusual experiment. Martin (Mads Mikkelsen), Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), and Peter (Lars Ranthe) are bored and disaffected with their lives to varying degrees. At Nikolaj’s 40th birthday, they discuss the theory of Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud—who since this film came out has been struck off Norway’s medical register due to professional misconduct—that humans are born with a blood alcohol content (BAC) deficiency of 0.05%. Skårderud believed that keeping one’s BAC at that level, roughly equivalent to a drink or two, makes one more outgoing, relaxed, and creative.
The four decide to put Skårderud’s theory to the test and maintain a constant level of inebriation. Initially, they keep their BAC around 0.05% by drinking throughout the day, but will not drink after 8 p.m. or on weekends. They take inspiration from figures like Ernest Hemingway: “We're not the first people in the world to drink a little alcohol during the day,” Peter says. “Hemingway, for instance, he drank every day until 8 p.m., and then stopped so that he was fit to write the next day. And his work was masterful. So if we're doing this, I guess that'll be our approach.”
Initial results are very good indeed. All four find their teaching enhanced; their students more enthusiastic, and getting better results. Later they increase the BAC minimum to 0.1%. Even Martin’s relationship with his wife Anika (Maria Bonnevie) and their sons improves. He takes them on a canoe trip and re-ignites a level of passion with Anika that had been missing from their marriage. Finally, one night, our four protagonists drink themselves into oblivion to see just how liberating the effects of alcohol can become. They spend a wild night partying, during which it becomes clear that these middle-aged professional men are as sloppy, immature, and unruly as the drunken teenagers we saw at the start of the film. They’re slurring their words and falling down in public. Things start to get messy and spin out of control, in every sense of the word.
Another Round is the best movie I’ve seen about the contradictory role of alcohol in Western culture, which is very much a drinking culture. As Anika tells Martin, “This whole country drinks like maniacs anyway.” Booze plays a prominent role in almost every major social occasion. We drink to celebrate joyous occasions like weddings and holidays. We drink to drown our sorrows. We drink when socializing on evenings and weekends. Nightlife is largely organized around drinking at bars, pubs, and clubs. Concerts and sports events are strongly associated with the consumption of alcohol. There’s a good reason alcohol is known as “social lubricant”: it lowers inhibitions and tends to make people more outgoing.
Historically there has often been a back-and-forth between celebration and condemnation of alcohol consumption. The negative social consequences of drink gave rise to the modern temperance movement and prohibition, which proved a failure in the United States. Yet booze remains connected with social problems. Studies have consistently linked alcohol consumption and violent crime, with drinking identified as an aggravating factor in anywhere between 30 to 65% of cases. The World Health Organization found alcohol causes 3.2% of all deaths worldwide, or 1.8 million deaths annually, and accounts for 4% of the disease burden. Heavy drinking can also adversely affect personal relationships, put jobs at risk, and cause humiliation or social ostracism from embarrassing behaviour while drunk.
In Another Round we see many of these aspects of drinking, both good and bad. Mild alcohol consumption leads to improvements in the characters’ lives, careers, and relationships. That trend continues even when they drink more. It’s only when they wildly overindulge that negative consequences start to occur. A character whose son wet the bed now finds himself wetting the bed, which is a good illustration of how extreme drunkenness makes one regress to an infantile state. Some would find an obvious moral lesson to draw here: that drinking is good as long as it’s in moderation. To quote the standard message in ads for beer, wine, and liquor, “Please drink responsibly.” Unfortunately, not everyone is capable of doing so. Some people have a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. When the negative consequences of their excessive drinking catch up with them, Martin is able to stop, but Tommy is not.
The attitude of Another Round towards alcohol is ambivalent, like society’s. Viewers will take different messages from it. Personally I had a darker interpretation. None of the characters’ lives are improved significantly by their drinking. Even when drinking leads directly to tragedy, characters respond by … drinking. Granted, there’s often social pressure to do so. Still, the film ends on a note that seems to throw caution to the wind and indicate that their drinking will continue, for better or for worse.
I appreciated Another Round for making us think anew about the outsize role alcohol plays in our culture, the reasons we drink, and the dangers of excess. The high-concept premise of the drinking experiment is a novel foundation for a plot. But the situation the characters find themselves in at the outset—their dissatisfaction with their lives, etc.—are eminently relatable, as are their reasons for drinking: to be more outgoing and sociable, more creative, etc. The actors are all great, but I need to single out Mads Mikkelsen, so often pigeonholed by Hollywood as the villain in blockbuster franchises. It’s nice seeing Mikkelsen able to do some more naturalistic acting playing a “normal” character. There are lots of funny moments as well as heart-rending dramatic scenes. The film shows the dangers of alcoholism, but does so in a way that never feels preachy. Rather, it just feels like what happens in life. It’s a quality of the best works of art that they teach us something about ourselves.