Becoming Astrid
“Becoming Astrid” is a dream come true for everyone out there who has been waiting and waiting for a drama about the early life of Swedish author Astrid Lindgren (“Pippi Longstocking”).
This movie tells you all you need to know about her and more. It tells you at length, it tells you slowly, and best of all, it tells you in Swedish. If that sounds great to you, then we know what you should be doing tonight.
For everyone else, who might be somewhat less rabid on the subject, “Becoming Astrid” will be received with a mixture of appreciation and puzzlement — appreciation for the performance of Alba August, who plays Astrid, and for the conscientiousness of the production, but puzzlement at the deluxe treatment, as if she were Ray Charles or something. This is probably a case of something being lost in the cultural translation.
The movie assumes an intense interest on the part of its audience, but it doesn’t ever get a chance to create an intense interest for those who don’t share it, partly because the movie deals only in Lindgren’s origins, not in her years of accomplishment.
It’s rather like a movie about JFK that shows him being a prankster at Choate and playing touch football in Hyannis Port, and that’s about all.
To be fair, Lindgren’s early life was a bit more turbulent than that, involving premarital sex, adultery, an unexpected pregnancy, travel to another country, a court case and an affair with at least with one employer, maybe two.
By all accounts, including this movie, Astrid had a wild streak, or at least a fiercely independent streak. She was brave in her personal life, funny, and apparently confident. Yet something in the arrangement or rhythms of the story, as we receive it here, seems to militate against drama.
There’s not a bad scene in it — not one — and yet a certain lack of inflection in all its many pretty-good scenes gives “Becoming Astrid” a flat quality that doesn’t really feel inherent in the material. One source of the problem may be that the movie ends too soon. The movie takes its time going through Lindgren’s early life, then cuts off before she writes a single book — that is, before she becomes Astrid.
A better solution might have been to streamline, from two hours to 70 or 75 minutes, the biographical material in this film and then extend the story to the point when she starts actually doing something.
Yet quibbles aside, it’s very easy to believe Alba August as the incarnation of a protobrilliant author, with her atmosphere of mischief and intelligence, and the re-creation of 1920s Sweden feels accurate. At one point, Astrid gets a bob — after all, it’s 1924 — but it’s not the same bob that New York girls were getting on Fifth Avenue. Rather it’s a bob that looks like provincial Sweden. It’s thick and a little lopsided and calls to mind photos of the teenage Greta Garbo.