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Having arranged for his admission into a last-ditch rehab program, a terminally cancer-stricken mother demands that her skanky, coke-snorting daughter Kaisa ferry her estranged alcoholic husband (and the daughter's estranged alcoholic father) Tomas from his home in Oslo to her deathbed in Aberdeen. They forge ahead about as well as could be expected, and end up taking a ride from Clive, a lonely young soccer-hooliganesque trucker who's got more of his act together than both of them combined.
Ah, the romance of drunkenness. Oh, wait — I'm thinking of every other movie about alcoholism. In Aberdeen, Tomas' condition couldn't be less romantic: he's always stumbling around half-coherent at best, urinating in flower beds, puking on Kaisa while she drives or getting showered in beer by a pack of wandering, suited young toughs. You know that theory about the behavior of congressmen that claims their actions can pretty much all be explained as a function of pursuing reelection? Nearly every single one of Tomas' actions can be explained as a function of pursuing booze. Maybe that's because there's — as the Brits say — fuck-all to do but drink when you're a retired Norwegian oil rig worker, but man, staying soused is all he cares about. He doesn't even have the burning self-destructive drive that most movie drunks do; he just needs to maintain inebriation. (And he doesn't like to be reminded of it; when he asks Kaisa and Clive if they're hungry, Kaisa responds, "You mean thirsty? No!" and his face justfalls.)
That's not to say that Kaisa's much better; ultimately, I could summon even less sympathy for her, but I've never claimed not to prefer middle-aged Scandinavian drunkards to twentysomething paper-pushing libertines. The two make their way through that classic form, the road movie, a genre which affords lesser filmmakers a chance to stuff in every cliché of cinema's last fifty years. Aside from a bit of capital-S Symbolism, Moland resists that, a choice for which I'm grateful, opting instead for a realism that punctuated either by lapses into the slightly surreal or just lapses into Scottish stuff I don't understand, such as the aforementioned pack of relatively well-dressed thugs. Are there really so few attractions in Scotland that it's a viable choice for a bored young man to don a blazer, shake up a can of beer and then go around with the lads spraying pathetic drunks with it?
Giving the issue a bit more thought, though, I'm not entirely sure how confidently I can call the film realistic. I mean, the hassles Tomas and Kaisa endure are drawn from life for sure, but I have no basis on which to declare that their substance abuse is bravely approached with badly-needed realism or anything. That's because I don't know any alcoholics; I don't know them very well, at least. That, and I keep my distance from the skanks — boy howdy, do I keep my distance. Coke is something of an anachronism these days too, so I don't exactly see it in action. But none of this stuff is romanticized in Aberdeen, so even if it's not a gritty, all-too-real portrait of the drinks and the drugs, it's successfully convinced me that it is, and really, isn't that all a movie has to do?
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