OT: Life lessons for Servetus from the Branagh Wallander

Last year, the discs my friend and colleague the former Cambridge professor pressed into my hand before his annual peregrination to Merrie Olde England for the winter solstice were North & South. (More about that soon, I do promise. That post has been underway for weeks and hard to write.) This year, he proffered up the first three episodes of the BBC’s Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh, before he rolled his briefcase out of the building. I’ve long been a fan of these books; I read them in German along with, one suspects, basically every other literate German — they were huge, huge bestsellers there before most of the English-speaking world had heard of Henning Mankell. I also suspect that Mankell prepared a path for the huge successes of Stieg Larsson, whose books I enjoyed though I don’t feel much personal identification with Lisbeth Salander (I admire her, though, the way I do Ros). I don’t think these films are as good as the books — that’s setting a very high bar — but Servetus never thinks the film is as good as the book, or almost never, and these films are excellent by any standard.

1. From “Sidetracked,” the first film. Wallander (Branagh) confesses to his father (played by David Warner) that he doesn’t think he can continue as a policeman:

2. From “Firewall,” the second film. The soon-to-be divorced Wallander (Branagh) is out on a date with Ella (Orla Brady), whom he met via a computer dating profile created by his daughter. He can’t stop thinking about work, and the conversation turns serious:

3. From “Firewall.” Wallander’s daughter, Linda (Jeany Spark) apologizes for setting him up with Ella (about whom I won’t say more in case you want to watch the film):

I’ve long seen myself reflected — uncomfortably — in the character of Wallander. From my perspective, the identification came because Wallander so consistently fails at everything. He’s too late; he doesn’t do what he’s supposed to do; he fails the people who love him most; he knows what he has to do to change and yet he can’t manage it. And even at work — the thing for which he saves all of his energy — he’s so often wrong, so often too late, so often incapable of finding justice for the crime victims he serves. I’m putting these pieces here as distillations to remind myself of stuff I don’t want to forget. If / when this blog ends, the last clip could probably serve as a postscript to it. Even experiences that begin in failure, or end in aporia, teach us important things. Last year around this time, a face I saw on a screen — Mr. Armitage — shocked me into the realization that I’m still alive.

~ by Servetus on December 27, 2010.