Reprise

Over at Pajiba, I review Reprise, a Norwegian movie about best-friend novelists. Here's the start:

Writers are notoriously hard to capture on screen. Not in a physical sense, like Bigfoot — after all, they’re normally just sitting at a keyboard somewhere — but in a spiritual sense. Whatever spirit might be alive in their work is not much on outer display. Think of Frank Langella in last year’s Starting Out in the Evening, playing a fictional novelist who quietly lumbered around and occasionally clanked on an ancient typewriter. Or Philip Seymour Hoffman, who managed to make Truman Capote seem dull for long stretches of time, which he may have been while isolated and working in Kansas. Excellent actors, hemmed in by scripts overly interested in typing.

In the energetic and poignant Reprise, Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier maneuvers around this problem by not being overly concerned — or reverent — about writing.