‘22 July’ reveals pain of Norway terror attack
Writer-director Paul Greengrass, of “United 93,” “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum” fame, returns to a real-life event in the gutwrenching “22 July,” a fictionalized account of the 2011 lone wolf terrorist bombing of a government building in Oslo and follow-up mass shooting on a nearby island, resulting in 77 fatalities, many adolescents, by the neo-Nazi gunman Anders Behring Breivik (actor, musician and medical doctor Anders Danielsen Lie).
This a ticking bomb movie, a countdown to events you are probably familiar with and probably dread reexperiencing. Using his you-are-there hand-held camera technique and a Norwegian cast speaking English, Greengrass methodically takes us back to the hours before the attacks, when a pseudomilitary-like Breivik can be seen making a fertilizer bomb in some idyllic yet spooky woods near Oslo. At the same time, we see nearby Utoya Island, a property in a lake near Oslo associated with the liberal Norwegian Labor Party. The island is the location of a yearly summer camp. Breivik, who lives with his frightened mother in a small Oslo apartment, plans to kill as many of the children of “the elite” and cause as much pain as possible.
With Breivik on one side of the narrative, which is based on the book by Asne Seierstad, we also meet would-be victims and their family and others. These include Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg (Ola G. Furuseth), who is dealing with the Oslo bombing when word of a shooting on Utoya Island reaches him. On the island we meet Viljar Hanssen (Jonas Strand Gravli) and his younger brother Torje (Isak Bakli Aglen) and their government worker parents back in Oslo, including their mother, who is running for mayor of their
small suburban town. The film also covers Viljar’s agonizing recovery, and the trial of Breivik, who hires a reluctant star attorney, famously gives a Nazi salute in court and refuses to pursue an insanity defense.
One might argue that “Bloody Sunday” (2002), the film that put Greengrass on the map, was the chronicle of a historical event, the 1972 massacre of Irish protesters by British troops in Derry, Northern Ireland. Greengrass’ “United 93” (2006), a film about the 9/11 attacks, and now “22 July” on the other hand, have come much closer to the actual events, when the real and psychic wounds are much fresher. This has made these films more difficult for me to sit through, frankly.
Still, “22 July,” which boasts the usual Greengrass first-rate cast, has been made more relevant to us by the seemingly endless cycle of assault-rifle mass shootings here in the United States and the recent rise of neo-Nazi groups and white supremacy. Strand Gravli’s performance as the permanently maimed Viljar brings home the idea of the cost even to the survivors of such atrocities. “22 July” is a reminder that we are only one armed lunatic away from the darkness.