‘22 July’ draws Greengrass back to high-stakes real-life drama
British director explores attack on Norwegian camp
For the past 16 years, British filmmaker Paul Greengrass has become cinema’s poet laureate of political violence, an artist who has shaped a cinematic language – jagged, naturalistic, neutral but engaged – around some of the most wrenching collective traumas of the 20th and 21st centuries.
In 2002, Greengrass made “Bloody Sunday,” about the 1972 massacre of Irish civil rights protesters by British troops; “United 93” (2006) was an unnervingly realistic dramatization of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In 2013’s “Captain Phillips,” Greengrass re-enacted the 2009 hijacking of a container ship by Somali pirates to address deeper issues of globalization and disenfranchisement. Now, with “22 July,” about a right-wing assassin’s attack on a youth camp in Norway in 2011, the filmmaker has returned to some of his cardinal themes – terrorism and the parameters of how best to respond to it.
“I never thought I would do another one after ‘United 93,’ I must say,” he admitted during a conversation at the Toronto International Film Festival, where “22 July” had its world premiere. (The film is currently available in theaters and on Netflix.) “It came as a surprise.”
Greengrass had traveled to Lampedusa, Italy, with the thought of making a film about the migration crisis, he said, when he woke up one day and realized he was “in the wrong part of Europe.” He continues: “I went for a walk with the dogs and I came back and thought ‘I wonder if I should look at how the migrant journey begins here, you cross the water, you get into Europe and you move to wherever, and then what do you find there?”
It was at that point that Greengrass read the testimony of Anders Behring Breivik, who on July 22, 2011, bombed Oslo’s civic center, killing eight people, then traveled to the island of Utoya, where at a Labour Party camp he gunned down the staff and their charges, ultimately murdering 69 people, most of them teenagers.
“I felt an icy feeling reading it,” Greengrass recalls of Breivik’s statement, which included rambling critiques of Islam, immigration, multiculturalism and the “deconstruction” of Norway. “I remember reading that and thinking, ‘That’s unbelievable,’” Greengrass said. “When he said those words in 2011, that would have been considered outré and outrageous. That’s mainstream now for politicians across the populist right. Not that they approve of Breivik’s methods, but the rhetoric, the world view, the words, they’re all the same.”
True to form, Greengrass stages the real-life events of his movie with methodical detail, up to and including initial scenes revisiting the bloody rampage at the camp. The rest of “22 July” is dedicated to how the citizenry and government of Norway responded to the attack, culminating in a stirring courtroom showdown between Breivik and a teenager named Viljar Hanssen, who sustained life-threatening injuries during the assault.