Movie Review: A Fortunate Man (2018)

A reminder of literature past

J.P. Williams
3 min readApr 29, 2024
Photo by Thomas on Unsplash.

We rise and fall, entangling others. This is one of many truths tucked into the 2018 Danish film Lykke-Per (A Fortunate Man), directed by Bille August. Based on the classic novel of the same name by Nobel Prize winner Henrik Pontoppidan, the film is an exquisite historical drama set in 19th-Century Denmark, but its themes run toward the universal.

The film opens with young Peter Sidenius leaving his devout Calvinist family of modest means in the heaths of Jutland for Copenhagen, where he will study engineering. He has a talent for it, may even be a genius, and he dreams of modernizing Denmark through a vast network of windmills and waterwheels capturing the power of nature to provide the nation with electricity. He’s obsessive, socially awkward and determined to make it in the big city. He has the confidence to network his way into high society, but the pride, fueled by a hatred of his origins, to get his back up when humility is needed most. Then there’s his tendency to use the people around him, especially the women, before moving on to circles more promising of social advancement.

The film features an impressive cast, script, costume design and direction, but it remains steadfastly, and admirably, understated. The true standout is Katrine Greis-Rosenthal as Jakobe Salomon, a Jewish woman fated to be Love Casualty №2 along Peter’s trajectory. So capable is she of conveying intense emotion without overacting that I can’t believe she hasn’t conquered the industry outside Denmark. Sara Viktoria Bjerregaard in the role of Inger, Love Casualty №3, is so immensely, so wonderfully, the gorgeous, big-hearted country lass that your disbelief suspends without a trace and you walk away feeling elevated by her, the fictional being’s, existence in this world.

These actresses outshine their lead actor. Esbed Smed is on the screen enough to secure his blocking upstage, but ultimately he fails to fill Peter’s shoes. He’s suitably likable and awkward, and he’s remarkably inscrutable at times, making his character as maddening to me as he is destructive to those in his orbit, but he’s unable to convey the necessary inner turmoil and utterly lacks gravitas, crucial late in the film when Peter is a graybeard, older and wiser, if no happier. Better in the role than the annoyingly handsome hunks of wood Hollywood tends to plunk out, he elevates the film to a point but never sends it soaring. Thus, the film’s depth is less apparent in the moment than on reflection.

Fiction showing the ways our lives intertwine through chance has been fashionable for some time — my own viewing history has a big thumbtack shoved in Magnolia (1999) — but A Fortunate Man reveals the pre-postmodern outlook of its source material through showing how character and the choices borne of it drive outcomes for ourselves and those around us. Peter is his biggest strength and weakness, the engine of his successes and failures, as are those he woos and strands, romantically and financially. Early in the film we are told that Jakobe has a “protective,” think mothering, nature and this leads to her suffering and salvation. Far from fickle, Fate insists her dramatis personae own their deeds.

It’s hard to rave about A Fortunate Man, yet I’m put in mind of Tom Stoppard’s Parade’s End (2012), one of the best works of film and television I’ve encountered in recent years, one similarly based on a century-old work of fiction. The old authors knew how to channel the universals of human experience through singular characters, and vice versa. It’s a language we’re losing, so we need as many creators as possible, such as those behind this film adaptation, to remind us of its power.

Note: I wrote this for Medium.com. If you are reading this on another platform, it has been pirated. I quit the Medium Partner Program, so I’m not doing this for money. It is nice, however, to know someone’s reading, so please clap or comment to let me know somebody’s out there. Gladius adhuc lucet.

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J.P. Williams

Just back from a break. Mostly writing about boxing now.