Toni Erdmann (2016): Genre-busting Comedrama

 Toni Erdmann is a a film that is hard to categorize and hard to describe. Billed as a comedy, it is tears-running down-your-face hilarious at certain times, drolly funny or astutely satirical elsewhere, sometimes just plain quirky and even squirmy-uncomfortable in places. But for much of its two hour and forty minutes, it does not feel quite like a comedy. It’s a domestic drama, a character study, a critique of corporate culture, a satire about gender politics. Regardless of the label, Toni Erdmann is always interesting and thought provoking.  I think it’s also slyly brilliant.

Throughout most of 2016, since it premiered at Cannes last May, this movie has been hailed by most commentators. Based on a poll of fifty top critics, the international cinema magazine Sight and Sound (based in London) rates Toni Erdmann the consensus best movie of the year. So does US-based Film Comment magazine. The picture’s Metacritic score is a very high 94, third highest score for a narrative feature in 2016, just behind Moonlight and Manchester by the Sea. It’s been nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film category.

I’ve seen it twice now, once in mid-October at a festival and again a couple weeks ago. It is, perhaps, the most intriguing movie I’ve seen over the past year, in part because it is so hard to pin down. For a comedy it digs awfully deep; for a drama it’s seriously funny.

As you’d imagine, such a film is far more than a description of the plot can possibly suggest, but here goes [no real spoilers here, folks]:

Basically, it's about a recently retired music teacher, Winfried (Peter Simonischek), and his deep yet strained relationship with his adult daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller), an international business consultant. Winfried is divorced and lives alone. Other than Ines, Winfried seems to have little family beyond his aging mother, who’s not all that fond of him (for reasons that become apparent as we get to know him a bit). He has few, if any, friends other than his ancient little dog, Willi, who’s seen better days. Winfried is a weird fellow who loves to play pranks on people, which may explain his loneliness – not that he can help it. The movie starts with a representative example: when a package arrives at his door, Winfried has the deliveryman wait, telling him it’s for his brother, Toni, adding that Toni just got out of prison following a conviction for sending parcel bombs, then makes the poor fellow wait there nervously with the new parcel, until he returns - disguised as “Toni”, with fake teeth and a ratty fright wig - to sign for it. For us, as the situation plays out it’s pretty funny – not so for the increasingly apprehensive schmuck at the door.  

Ines is working on a tricky deal having to do with downsizing a Rumanian oil operation. Locally, there will be significant negative humanitarian effects if the deal goes through, as well as potential negative political fallout if it is not handled correctly.  The demands of her position require careful attention to the latter, while turning a blind eye to the former. Work and professional standing are all that matters to Ines, who’s constantly on her cell when she’s not in meetings. Even her social life (and sex life) is centered on her job.

Winfried worries about his daughter, concerned about her obsessive focus on work, her seriousness, the absence of fun in her life. When his mother and the beloved Willi sequentially shuffle off this mortal coil, Winfried decides to pay an unannounced visit to Ines in Bucharest. It’s a life-saving project in his view, but for Ines it’s something else again.  Awkward for both, this doesn’t go well, and Winfried shortly leaves.  But not for long. He soon returns,  this time as his alter ego, Toni Erdmann, with the teeth and wig, along with a tackily shiny suit and an invented occupation: he is a life coach, supposedly with Ines’s CEO as a top client. Unlike Winfried, he’s brash and oddly charming, insinuating himself into Ines’s world, popping up when she least expects it, chatting up her colleagues.  Rather than out him, Ines sees this new incarnation of her father as a challenge; and the jousting takes off from there.

How is this funny? In part because Winfried, in both of his personas, is often ridiculously goofy. Interestingly, we laugh with him and feel a bit sorry for him at the same time – because his pranks and other attempts at humor are so clearly born out of loneliness and pain, yet are often truly funny. Many situations in the movie derive their humor out of the social tension he creates. For example, when “Toni” is gulling Ines’s colleagues (or trying to), she knows and we know what’s really going on, while the other characters don’t. Something’s not right about this guy, but they can’t figure out what or why; and as they try desperately to cope, to make sense of the nonsensical, we laugh -  because we are in on the joke. The strained relationship between Ines and her father, complicated by the sudden appearance of Dad as the bizarrely charismatic Toni Erdmann, is another comedic vein the film successfully mines.  Much of the humor is situational, but sometimes too it’s visual. Toni’s ridiculous teeth for example.  Or Winfried, in a Kakeri costume, crashing a party thrown by Ines in her apartment. A Kakeri is an Eastern European folkloric figure looking like a very tall, very very hairy yeti; and when this one arrives out of the blue, he’s so ludicrous, you can’t help but laugh.

That the Kakeri shows up at the tail end of one of the funniest scenes in the movie doesn’t hurt. This is the already famous “naked party”, which I will not describe, but is really the capper of the film, comedy-wise.

As I said, Toni Erdmann is much more than a silly comedy. At its heart, the picture is about core values, both personal and societal; a critique of of modern multinational business mores and culture, about gender and power relationships in the workplace; about a father's love for his adult daughter and his struggle to find a way to connect with her. The shifting relationship between Winfried and Ines is developed touchingly with surprising depth and complexity. It plays out as a competition between father and daughter, but also between generational worldviews.  

Winfried no longer understands his daughter yet fears she is on a dead-end path to soullessness. His paternal attempts to connect with her have failed. His decision to reappear as the absurd but challenging Toni is his attempt to break the mold of their old father-daughter relationship, forcing himself to improvise while giving him greater freedom to penetrate her world, see that world more clearly, and confront Ines on her own turf.  Says Writer-Director Maren Ade, “Humor is his only weapon, and he starts using it to the hilt. That means playing a much tougher game; and since Ines is a tough cookie herself, he is suddenly speaking language she understands.”  So Ines, too, steps out on the high wire to negotiate, so to speak, new terms of engagement with her Dad. This allow the two of them to rebalance their power relationship. Eventually Ines comes to see her father's concerns and thus the pattern of her own life more clearly.

Toni Erdmann is notable for its unpredictability, its mashing of genres and, somewhat surprisingly, for its subtlety and sentimentality. Plus, the performances of Peter Simonischek as Winfried/Toni and Sandra Hüller as Ines are sharp and completely believable. Simonischek walks a fine line in his portrayal of Toni Erdmann, giving us a character believable enough to seem plausibly real to Ines’s colleagues, while allowing us to see Winfried all the while. Hüller is amazing as Inez, gradually showing us the cracks in the armor of her tightly wound, emotionally suppressed character, and to engage our sympathies with a remarkably brave performance.

This is the third feature film for writer–director Maren Ade, and a significant leap forward. Her last feature, Everyone Else (2009) was also about relationships, in that case a romantic one: following a young couple on vacation in Sardinia trying to figure out who they are and whether their relationship can and should last. That was a much simpler production, essentially dialogue-driven, with a narrow focus on the two leads, a small supporting cast, little action and light plot. Toni Erdmann not only has larger ambitions, but is more entertaining and artistically successful as well. Ade is a moviemaker to watch.

 I liked this picture quite a lot each time I saw it and recommend it strongly. See it with a friend, and you’ll find a lot to talk about after.  It is, however, not for everyone. For one thing, it’s in German with English subtitles, which for some is a drawback. It is on the long side at 162 minutes – although all of those minutes are earned. And it features a couple scenes of male and female nudity that those on the prudish side of the spectrum might find uncomfortable. One of these actually involves a sex act (not violent), which may be disturbing to some viewers, although it is totally integral to the themes of the film and pretty damned funny to boot. The movie is rated R.

I think it is an important film. Check it out and decide for yourself.

Grade: A

Toni Erdmann is being rolled out in limited release. As this is written it is being shown in just three theaters in the SF Bay Area – in SF, Berkeley and San Rafael. For a list of where the movie is currently playing and/or when it will open in your area, click HERE.