All hail Viggo Mortenson as the American answer to Max Von Sydow, that is to say, a serious and thoughtful-seeming actor who can go from all-star escapism and fluff such as HIDALGO and the LORD OF THE RINGS films to way off-the-beaten-track foreign fare, personal projects and “art” films. Now watch, Mortenson will show up as a cartoon bad guy or cape-wearer in a Justice League movie, shaking his fist and saying “I’ll get you Wonder Woman!” and I will be begging Bob Ignizio to take down this posting. Or at least put his own by-line on it. I’m so sick of comic-book movies.The multi-lingual Mortenson stars and co-produced (for iconic French studio Pathe) the French- and Arabic-language drama FAR FROM MEN, which represents director David Delhoffen’s decent expansion of the Albert Camus short story “The Guest,” on which generations of high-school students such as I had been weaned (to all my fellow former high-school French students, anyone found any jobs out there? I’m still looking).
Unlike similar attenuations of short-story material, this one doesn’t feel terribly padded, even if it does bring some sex and more violence into the tale than Camus did.
