One word that I have seen repeatedly used to describe Bent Hamer’s dramedy on the Golden Years is “quiet.” Yes, this is a quiet film—long, lingering scenes dwelling on protagonist Odd Horten’s deeply-lined expressive face; meandering moments when the camera wanders away from Odd’s adventures and just kind of moseys along streetscapes with a tinkling, pared-down soundtrack; Odd’s stoic acceptance of the random and bizarre circumstances he finds himself in—it is deadpan to a fault, understated to the point of being, well…kind of boring.

It’s a coming-of-age tale for the elderly, following a man who, up until the day of his retirement, never fully learned how to enjoy life. After a series of simple, unrelated, accidental happenstances—none of which singularly amount to much but the sum of all ultimately leading to Odd’s late-life awakening—Mr. Horten comes to fully understand the joie de vivre, and learns to seize life by the horns, live every moment as if it were your last, carpe diem and the like.

Which is cute. Terribly, affectaciously cute.

Perhaps O’Horten is only guilty of its own Nordic reserve, cherishing more the quiet things left unsaid that the more in-your-face tactics of similarly-themed American films (About Schmidt comes to mind here, an equally affected though much more effective film ruminating on a man’s feelings of uselessness and powerlessness that comes from retirement after decades of regimented and purposeful work and, by extension, the greater societal dismissiveness of the elderly). Perhaps the film cannot be faulted for being at once painfully slow-moving yet equally painfully saccharine. Perhaps Norwegian filmmaker Hamer has been too nearly influenced by his Dogme 95 friends in nearby Denmark, espousing (among other things) the rejection of flashy Hollywood ideals.

Perhaps. Or perhaps this is just simply a poorly-crafted film, opting for the more sickly-sweet (and less challenging) approach to the humiliations and regrets of aging as opposed to the infinite possibilities with a more probing, more psychologically devastating approach (hell, classic film noir showpiece Sunset Boulevard did a better job at showcasing a person’s fragile state when confronted with the inescapable process of aging). The problem with this film is not necessarily in its slow pace and deadpan demeanor—in fact, if the film hadn’t so readily devolved into a Spielbergien heartstring-tugger, this sort of quiet, understated approach could have served it particularly well.

The problem is that the very basic attributes of the character Odd Horten that we are supposed to understand are never really explored—we assume he has led a life of quiet solitude, one wholly dedicated to his job, observing a strictly regimented routine revolving around his work as a conductor, the only thing in his life that gives him purpose. Yes, surely we can assume all of these things, though save for a handful of actual quotes from other characters in the story that make Odd out to be something of a fuddy-duddy, we never really see this. Nor do we see his own psychological duress when faced with what we assume to be his sudden feelings of purposelessness. Sure, we can assume his aimless wanderings are an outward symptom of such feelings of no longer having a place…just as easily as we can assume, from his passive, stoic expression and seemingly absolute lack of awareness of the peculiarities happening around him, that none of it fazes him in the least and he just so happens to be having a Very Strange Day(s).

From attempting to climb a fire escape to a friend’s home and spending the night in a small boy’s bedroom (which sounds like the beginning of a very different kind of film but rest assured, it is all perfectly innocent) to a very droll comedy of errors in trying to find someone at an airport (a scene that is probably the best example of dry humor in the film but is also the most disposable) to stumbling upon a drunk man in the street while wearing women’s boots (“They’re not mine,” says Odd simply) and returning to the man’s home for an eye-opening evening of carpe diem adventure (this being the exact point at which the movie sheds its skin of stoic removal and becomes a full-blown emotional manipulator), Odd’s adventures suffer from a kind of disconnect, so that viewers are never really sure how exactly we got from Point A to Point Weepy.

In the end, everything works out quite nicely for Odd, as things so often do in these kinds of films. The emotional catharsis has been had, and we all move on with our lives more satisfied in knowing that even in old age it’s never too late to live. This is all wonderful and uplifting; I just wish this message had been a little less hammered-over-the-viewers’-heads-in-the-last-20-minutes and more carefully and thoughtfully explored throughout the film, leading to a catharsis that seemed to make a little more sense for this particular character, whom we never really even got to know.

O’Horten plays at the Detroit Film Theatre inside the DIA now through Sunday, June 28th.  See wesbite for details.