PTSD Runs in the Family

LOUDER THAN BOMBS (A-minus) - A strong cast brings home a quietly effective drama about dysfunctional family whose emotions and shortcomings are exposed by the death of the woman who shaped them.

Norwegian director Joachim Trier, five years after his punch in the gut about the day in the life about a drug addict, "Oslo, August 31st," once again teams up with writer Eskil Vogt for a well observed character study of wounded souls. Here he follows a father dealing with his two sons after the death of their mother, who was a superstar war photographer and, by extension, a distant wife and mother, literally and figuratively.

Isabelle Huppert appears in sporadic flashbacks as Isabelle, who is addicted to the adrenaline rush of her globetrotting and is more devoted to her award-winning career than she is to her husband, Gene (a somber Gabriel Byrne). In a tender scene, she taunts him with a recitation of a sexual dream she had, and he playfully accuses her of trying to pick a fight with him. Gene suspects that Isabelle is closer with her correspondent colleague (and the couple's friend) Richard (David Straithairn, powerfully understated) than she has let on.

The couple's grown son, Jonah (a somewhat wooden Jesse Eisenberg), a fledgling professor, is escaping from the suffocating trap that is his beautiful wife and newborn and finds sanctuary with Gene, belatedly sifting through Isabelle's archives a year or two after her death. Still living at home is teenaged Conrad (Devin Druid), a tortured soul struggling to process his mother's death and his painful awkwardness with classmates.  Conrad longs to make a connection with a cute girl-next-door type, and he nurtures a significant writing talent that seems to be his only form of self-expression. Meantime, he berates his father, lies to him, and seems to resent him for letting Isabelle abandon them through the years. Her death, ironically, in a local car crash gnaws at him. Gene has neglected to tell Conrad the truth that everyone else knows -- Isabelle's death was likely a suicide. Richard's impending profile of Isabelle in the New York Times will reveal that uncomfortable truth, and the question here is whether Gene will be able to step up and have the decency to catch Conrad up to speed before the Times casually reports it on Page 1.

Trier effortlessly plays with the story's chronology, jumping back and forth in time, repeating scenes from a different character's perspective. But instead of that being confusing, it almost feels natural, mimicking the way we pass through our days, cycling from the past to the present constantly. Trier eases us into the disjointed rhythms, like an expert jazz musician, and it deepens the viewing experience.

Huppert, with that intimidating blank stare of hers, haunts these men and boys like a ghost floating through a horror film, just like the images of suffering that she captured haunted her to an early grave. While Byrne and Eisenberg mope a bit too much, Druid strikes just the right tone of teen angst and confusion. He's earnest and sensitive but angry and sullen. Trier is both compassionate and critical with Conrad as well as with Gene and Jonah.

When Jonah meets up with an old girlfriend, who is visiting her ailing mother in the hospital, he lets her think that his wife also is ill, rather than recovering in the maternity ward. Jonah uses this misdirection as a way of flirting anew with the girlfriend, and when Conrad overhears Jonah on the phone lying to his wife about his activities, Conrad is indignant. He tells his brother that if he had a girlfriend he would never lie to her. "Good luck with that," a bitter Jonah snaps back.

"Louder Than Bombs" feels acutely real, settling into the grooves of the classic dysfunctional family. There is a hint of "Ordinary People" and its suburban shiver to this production. It makes you smile and it makes you squirm. Trier is tuned into the hum of human existence, and he makes subversively insightful films to remind us of how we live.