Plain Talk

WHEN RONALD REAGAN and Mikhail Gorbachev met in what has been seen as the beginning of the end of the Cold War, the venue was an unassuming house overlooking the sea in Reykjavík, Iceland. Höfði House had been previously occupied by the poet Einar Benediktsson, who once wrote, “Take notice of the past if you would achieve originality.” Whatever else Einar meant, at this house, the necessity of learning from history can’t be ignored.

It is easier to imagine today’s enemies talking once you’ve seen the house. You see, it’s not the Avengers’ home base or one of those underground lairs favored by James Bond villains. It’s just a house, surrounded by the typical trappings of a small city—business headquarters, cafes, supermarkets. The Icelandic government uses it today for social gatherings. And what happened in it 30 years ago was at heart two people communicating, with a shared goal that transcended them both.

The notion of enemies sitting down and talking with each other is also at the heart of the magnificent new Icelandic film Rams, which I saw in a cinema about five minutes’ walk from Höfði. Two sheep-farming brothers live and work beside each other, but haven’t spoken for four decades. A family shadow has driven them apart—one of those decisions made by parents seeking the best for their children but not knowing how to arrive there. And so, separately, the brothers endure twice the hardships and experience only half the blessings of life amid this most exquisite landscape. Success is ignored by the other, or serves as an occasion for jealousy rather than celebration; Christmas is spent alone, no one to share the feast, and Icelandic winters are hardest of all.

Rams is dominated by a gorgeously naturalistic central performance by Sigurður Sigurjónsson as Gummi, the younger brother burdened by his father’s legacy. When he discovers that sheep belonging to his brother, Kiddi, may have been infected with a disease that will force wholesale slaughter of the neighboring flocks, Gummi first appears to act from envy. But then a world-weary commitment to doing what’s right takes over. The disease, and the brothers’ desire to salvage something good from their broken family history, provides the kind of opportunity for change that could have seemed contrived. But in director (and scriptwriter) Grímur Hákonarson’s hands, the story is so compelling that you may find yourself hoping that such an intervention awaits you on departing the cinema.

Rams made me think not only of the need for reconciliation between—and within—nations, but about the people from whom I feel distant, or who may feel distant from me, and to ask myself what steps I can take toward sitting down face-to-face and communicating.