As with the religious pilgrims who are the focus of this somber, meandering 166-minute film, rewards await those who can tough out the journey. Familiarity with the previous work of Danish director August (Pelle the Conqueror, Smilla’s Sense of Snow) will help prepare you for Jerusalem’s rigorous high-mindedness and old-fashioned patience in developing its plot. (There ain’t no such thing as “backstory” here, folks: every last relevant detail is dramatized with ruthless completeness.) August eases slowly into his tale, which deals with rural 19th Century Swedish villagers who follow a fanatical preacher named Hellgum (Taube) to Jerusalem. There, he assures them, they’ll be spared during the apocalypse and the Second Coming. One of the pilgrims is naïve young Gertrud (Bonnevie), recently jilted by boyfriend Ingmar (Friberg), a stolid young man who’s marrying a rich man’s daughter in order to save his family farm. From here on, we alternately follow Gertrud and the other pilgrims, and the neighbors they left behind. For all concerned, the idea of faith, in both the secular and spiritual senses of the word, is explored. Ingmar’s faith takes the form of a promise, made to his dying father, that he would protect the farm and continue the family tradition of leading the village. As for the pilgrims, huddled dormitory-style in a compound presided over by a charismatic American leader (Dukakis), they have to wrangle with the question of whether they’ve been saved by Hellgum or cruelly deluded. This summary glosses over a lot of detail, some of which feels integral to the questions the story has raised and some of which registers more as TV miniseries filler. Perhaps a bit less reverence to the source material (a novel by Selma Lagerlof) would have prevented Jerusalem’s occasional lapses into The English Patient Syndrome, a condition in which the viewer is nagged by doubts over whether she’s being edified by a complex, challenging story or merely wowed by “epic narrative sweep” and dynamite cinematography. In the end, though, justice is done to a powerful central idea: In the absence of anything irreducibly true or certain in life, many find in faith the positive effects of certainty divorced from any necessary connection to truth. The only problem then is suppressing our nagging awareness of the mental trick we’ve played on ourselves. Is dramatic elaboration of this process, however enriched with sumptuous images and generally superb acting, worth almost three hours of our time? For me, August gets the benefit of the doubt, simply because so few contemporary filmmakers have this much belief in the power of ideas. As for the God thing, I’m still working on that.
This article appears in January 24 • 2003.