Mads Mikkelsen and Nicolas Bro (Drafthouse Films)
Mutants, part man, part beast, run amok and fight among themselves in two new films opening this weekend. Millions of people will watch highly-paid heroes battle each other in Captain America: Civil War (which, contrary to the buzz, does not earn its comparisons to The Raid: Redemption). Maybe a few thousand will see Men & Chicken. I won’t argue that anyone seeing one should see the other instead, but despite the Captain’s big budget stunts, Men & Chicken delivers more WTF-per-screen-minute than the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The movie begins with a whispered voice-over, as if the narrator is telling a secret fairy tale. Two brothers gather up eggs and make their way out of what looks like a decrepit institution. The boys grow up to be Gabriel (David Dencik) and Elias (Mads Mikkelsen). While Gabriel visits their dying father in a hospital, Elias is on a blind date.
There’s a reason for his misplaced priorities. Elias and his brother are seriously damaged people. In the middle of his date with a paraplegic psychiatrist, he’s outraged that she dares interrupt the dream he’s trying to tell her: it’s about a bird with a human head that turns out to be his brother, whom he then rapes. “The bird or your brother?” his date tries to clarify. He flies into a rage: “Your job is to listen. Do all wheelchair users interrupt this much?”
Writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen sets his film’s unusual comic tone immediately, and you know within five minutes whether you should just walk out before things get really hairy and webbed (I hesitate to spoil the plot point of the stork with a harelip and human toes, but I feel it is my duty to warn the innocent). If you stick around for the ride, it’s provocative, fantastical, and disturbingly funny.
Although his date is a disaster, it still excites Elias so much so that he excuses himself to engage in his favorite pastime: he’s a compulsive masturbator. After the man whom they believe is their father dies, Gabriel and Elias learn that they have three half-brothers living on a remote Danish island, where things get even stranger.
Jensen wrote the screenplay for The Salvation, which starred Mikkelsen in a solid but relatively conventional Western. Men & Chicken is anything but conventional, even if it does come off like an Adam Sandler movie directed by the Brothers Quay, or a Farrelly brothers comedy on acid (the fraternal resonance is no coincidence).
The actors revel in their performances as disturbed but on some level sympathetic madmen. Mikkelsen, who like all the actors wears a prosthetic harelip to note the brothers’ common lineage, gives the obstinate Elias a hint of vulnerability. Instead of being horrified at his belligerence, you feel sorry for him that this is the only way he knows how to communicate. Even if he does drag his brothers to pick up girls—at a nursing home.
Uncomfortably amusing and almost poignant, Men & Chicken obviously isn’t for everybody, but if you like your Three Stooges slapstick tempered with disturbing genetic mutations, then this movie is for you.
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Men & Chicken
Written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen
With David Dencik, Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas
Not rated: contains genetic mutations, uncomfortable sexual situations and lots of potential nightmare fodder.
104 minutes
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema
