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| Max von Sydow |
Max von Sydow: an aristocrat of cinema who made me weep
From his fateful game of chess to a moving turn in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Von Sydow was the last standard bearer of Bergman’s high-minded movie idiom
Peter Bradshaw
Monday 9 March 2020
The opening of the seventh seal in the Book of Revelation, disclosing the truth of God’s existence and the second coming, will result in a mysterious silence in the kingdom of heaven – then the sound of trumpets and the thunderous uproar of Earth’s apocalyptic ending. In the movies, no actor has ever represented these ideas more seriously, nor shown humanity’s anguish in the face of God’s implacable silence or unassuageable anger more clearly, than Max von Sydow. He was virtually a book of revelation in himself.
The passionate severity of Von Sydow – and his ability to impersonate the ascetic nobility of some impossibly remote priestly or knightly order but with very human flaws – formed the bedrock of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and the staggering series of films he was to make with Bergman in the 1950s and 1960s. Beyond that, he virtually epitomised an entire, distinctively high-minded attitude to cinematic art in Europe. His films for Bergman were composed in a movie idiom that drew on Ibsen and Strindberg, Sjöström and Dreyer – and of which, since Bergman’s death in 2007, Von Sydow could be said to be the final standard bearer.
This was the handsome, sensitive face unforgettably haunted by fear, love, the heroic burden of faith and the terrible inevitability of death’s looming checkmate in The Seventh Seal. He was the crusader knight who returns from his futile theocratic military adventure to find his country ravaged with plague and consumed with panic about the imminent end of everything. Surveying this catastrophe of hubris and cruelty, he is haunted by the angel of death, with whom he plays a fateful game of chess; he must come to terms with what this implies about humanity’s creator and the final terrible judgment.
Von Sydow exemplified a fierce seriousness and high principle that lived on in the equally outstanding work he was to do with directors such as William Friedkin, George Stevens, Woody Allen, Bille August and Julian Schnabel. It was not typecasting, exactly, but more a question of directors recognising his vocation as an actor. In Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960), he was the father seeking a ruthless revenge for the rape and murder of his daughter: he was virtually an avenging God himself. In Through a Glass Darkly (1961) he is a man crucified by his wife’s mental illness, and in Winter Light (1963) he is the parishioner agonised by a crisis of faith. Perhaps it is in this movie that Von Sydow conveys a gaunt protestantism of personal pain.
Von Sydow made a creditable job of playing Jesus in Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told in 1965, but this well-meaning and stately film (much teased for John Wayne’s drawlingly awe-struck centurion at the crucifixion scene) was too carefully respectful to tap into Von Sydow’s dark power. But what can’t be underestimated in Von Sydow’s career is his magnificent – and important – work in horror classic The Exorcist in 1973. And in the role of the exorcist himself, his face prematurely harrowed and lined with the terrible burden of knowing the ways of the evil one, no other casting was possible. The Exorcist was a popular horror masterpiece – but without the unbending, unironic seriousness that Von Sydow brought to it, the film would have had far less impact.
In the 1980s, Von Sydow had a notable black-comic role – a role in which he came as close as he was ever going to come to satirising his own legendary persona – in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). He plays the difficult, misanthropic artist Frederick, whose girlfriend, Lee, played by Barbara Hershey, is being pursued by her sister Hannah’s husband. “You missed a very boring programme about Auschwitz,” Frederick rumbles at her from in front of the television, when Lee comes in from an evening of forbidden adventure. It is a thoroughly outrageous line, but Von Sydow carries it off with deadpan hauteur that is not quite the same as a gift for comedy (which this actor did not exactly have).
In the 1980s, Von Sydow had a notable black-comic role – a role in which he came as close as he was ever going to come to satirising his own legendary persona – in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). He plays the difficult, misanthropic artist Frederick, whose girlfriend, Lee, played by Barbara Hershey, is being pursued by her sister Hannah’s husband. “You missed a very boring programme about Auschwitz,” Frederick rumbles at her from in front of the television, when Lee comes in from an evening of forbidden adventure. It is a thoroughly outrageous line, but Von Sydow carries it off with deadpan hauteur that is not quite the same as a gift for comedy (which this actor did not exactly have).
It was a year later that Von Sydow starred in the well-regarded, Cannes Palme d’Or-winning Pelle the Conqueror. Playing an older man from Sweden who seeks a new immigrant life in Denmark, he received one of his two Oscar nominations. And it was probably this role that brought Von Sydow into a career phase that he had arguably always been preparing for: the old man. Perhaps the planes and lines of his face were always waiting for age to bring them to their fullest meaning.
At any rate, his Oscar nomination for Pelle the Conqueror made more sense that his second nomination for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the rather lame 9/11 fantasy in which Von Sydow was wasted in the silly wise role of an ageing mute.
For my money, the greatest of Von Sydow’s later roles, and one of his greatest ever screen performances, was in Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007). He plays Papinou, a grumpy invalid who irascibly submits to the indignity of being shaved by his middle-aged son – the fashionable magazine editor and man-about-town played by Mathieu Amalric. But then his son suffers a catastrophic stroke and is paralysed by “locked-in syndrome”.
The scene in which Von Sydow sobs with grief for his stricken son is a scene that Van Gogh could have pictured. I think it is the only time that I have twitched my glasses off and sobbed, really sobbed, in the cinema. And now I have to admit to being emotional at today’s news about Max von Sydow’s death. An aristocrat of cinema has gone.
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