Easy Money, is there such a thing?- well hop on the Nordic Noir bandwagon and you should see the big bucks rolling in. This is the genre that has Scandinavian Crime Fiction bursting from our bookshelves onto the big screens.
Screen adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy Millennium had viewers squirming in their seats for the last few years but now Jens Lapidus is the Swedish author influencing screenwriters far beyond the Scandinavian Peninsula. While Larsson’s writing was influenced by his career as a political journalist, Lapidus’s fictions are inspired by his occupation as one of Sweden’s most prominent criminal defence attorneys. His debut novel Easy Money was quickly snapped up by Scandinavian screenwriters making it Sweden’s top-grossing film of 2010.
While critically acclaimed throughout Scandinavia, the gritty thriller is only making waves across the water now, with its Australian Premiere taking place at the inaugural Scandinavian Film Festival in Sydney just this month.
Undoubtedly, the release of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2011 paved the way for Easy Money. But the recent popularity of ground-breaking TV crime dramas like The Killing, Borgen, and The Bridge, also helped, adding to the current craze for Nordic Noir right now.
There really couldn’t be a better time for Easy Money to be released to foreign audiences -so will fans of the genre be satisfied with the latest Scandinavian Crime Thriller?
With Easy Money, the plot isn’t anything we haven’t seen before – poor boy gets involved in petty crime in a bid to social climb, petty criminal meets rich beautiful girl and needs a lot of money fast to impress her, cocaine enters stage left and soon petty criminal is in way over his head….it could be the plot to Scarface.
But what makes Scandinavian thrillers different, what keeps audiences enthralled is how they use depth of character rather than over-the-top action sequences to impress – and Easy Money has character buy the bucket load.
Not that the movie is actionless, seen through the eyes of three players in the gritty Stockholm underground it packs considerable punch. Getting straight into the action, the movie starts with a prison breakout resulting in Jorge (Matias Padin Varela), a bearded Chilean criminal racing through a Swedish forest to freedom.
His paths soon cross with lower-class business student JW (Joel Kinnaman), who is passing himself off as the son of a diplomat to become part of Stockholm’s rich set. To finance his new lifestyle, JW unwittingly becomes involved in a major drug war, and with Serbian hitman Mrado (Dragomir Mrsic) hot on his heels, he realises he’s in over his head.
Luckily the plot heavy script is not bogged down with extended shoot-outs or explosions, just enough to kill off some characters and keep the story moving. Director Daniel Espinosa remains devoted to the book, focusing on the characters underlying interests and their inner motivations.
In many crime movies, the characters are inspired by simple greed, but here we have three men involved in crime who have retained some vestiges of conscience. JW is the victim of the very much class-based world of Stockholm.
The film makes it clear that Sweden is not quite the egalitarian state we imagine, but a nation where money, family and class still function as they do anywhere else.
Gaining a scholarship to an elite University, JW goes to painstaking lengths to fit in with his classmates, to the point of meticulously sewing expensive buttons on knock-off designer clothes. He is acutely aware after falling in love with rich, young sociality Sophie (Lisa Henni), that their relationship would dissolve if she found out he was actually the son of a drunken saw mill worker, not of a diplomat living in India. His criminal opponent, Serbian hitman Mrado, is no one-dimensional-thug.
A large portion of this film is dedicated to Mrado’s gentle relationship with his daughter, who has just come into his care after the state deemed her drug addicted mother incapable of looking after her.
In one touching scene, we see the hardman following a father and daughter around a supermarket, filling his basket with the same items the stranger is purchasing – he is out of his debt looking after a little girl and food shopping is clearly not his forte.
While fugitive Jorge’s goal to start a cocaine ring is less motivated by money, more by the impending birth of his niece. He wants to care for his sister and her baby, be the father figure that they never had.
Always present, if not precisely stated, is that for all three of these outsiders, crime is the only avenue they can imagine to escape from their situation and become independent. While class divisions and underworld violence may seem at odds with many people’s view of Sweden as a harmonious, safe country bound by social democratic ideals, Easy Money, like most Nordic Noir movies, is out to show that picture of Sweden is outdated.
To drive these character-based films you need great actors and heading up the cast, Joel Kinnaman does not disappoint. He nails the part of JW – a sad, weak victim of an established society.
Handsome and stoic, Kinnaman is unrecognisable as the Seattle based detective Stephen Holder he plays in the US version of Danish TV series The Killing. The star currently features in the new remake of Robocop and is set to take over Hollywood. Another thing to take over Hollywood is Easy Money – Warner Brothers bought the right to a remake last year and it is currently in production.
Unlike the David Flincher’s American version of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, this sounds like it could be a doozie, as rumour has it Zac Efron is starring as JW…yes Zac Efron…. Daniel Craig he ain’t.
So my verdict is, if you like this genre of movie you’ll love it, but make sure you see the original version before WB diminishes it of all its Scandinavian depth.
4/5
Scandinavian Film Festival Canberra July 8 – 20 Sydney July 9 – 27 Melbourne July 10 – 27 Brisbane July 11 – 20 Adelaide July 23 – 31 Perth July 24 – 30 Byron Bay July 25 – 30
