'Adam's Apples' tests the limits of goodness
The premise of "Adam's Apples" sounds like the set up for a joke: Did you hear the one about the neo-Nazi who was sentenced to do community service at a church?
Not for nothing, the movie, from the irreverent Dane Anders Thomas Jensen , is jokey to a fault. Just released from prison, Adam (Ulrich Thomsen ) arrives in the country for some court-ordered spiritual rehab. It doesn't look promising. He curses his Saudi housemate, Khalid (Ali Kazim ), with a slur and replaces the crucifix on his bedroom wall with a framed photo of Hitler . The file sent over to church describes him as "evil" (the film's English subtitles express this in capital letters.
But for Father Ivan (Mads Mikkelsen ), the tall, kindly presiding minister, Adam represents another opportunity to grow a rose from manure. Ivan is what you might call pathologically optimistic. He deems that "evil" label rude and doesn't blink when he sees the Hitler photo. Father Ivan wants Adam to choose a goal, so Adam opts to bake a cake with apples from the churchyard tree (it's beset with crows, worms, lightning).
If Adam's belligerence is unreasonable, so, too, might be Ivan's good will, which the film pitches as faith. When Adam shows Ivan that Khalid possesses an inexplicable wad of cash (for a possible terrorist operation) and points out that their other housemate, Gunnar (Nicolas Bro ), is a fat slob, Ivan shrugs it off. "If we listen to reason all the time," he insists, "the world would be a gloomy place." He's even immune to Adam's exasperated assaults. There's a disturbingly funny moment after Adam's first attack on him, when Ivan pops his bloodied face into the kitchen, where Adam has just bullied Gunnar, and speaks in his usual chipper cadences as if he hadn't just been pummeled.
Jensen is an accomplished screenwriter with a knack for developing people amid comic nonsense. A member of Denmark's defunct Dogme 95 prankster collective, he's written or co-written what seems to be every interesting Danish or Dane-directed movie to be released in the country in the last eight or nine years, the ones Lars von Trier didn't make: Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's "Mifune ," Lone Scherfig's "Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself ," Susanne Bier's "Open Hearts " and "After the Wedding ." (Dogme abhorred frills. To make up for that , Jensen uses a lot of mischievous, slightly wicked music to punch up the ludicrousness.)
The last film Jensen directed, 2003's proudly revolting "The Green Butchers," about two cannibals who go into charcuterie, was an idea in want of a story. So is "Adam's Apples." The movie doesn't escalate so much as sustain a balanced tone of frivolity and violence, blending the two in a couple of cartoonish sequences involving some point-blank shooting. The movie is one long pose. But it develops into an idea slightly greater than its flippancy. The steady frenzy is whipped into a roux of two reasonably developed characters.
Ivan might be the craziest person in this picture. But Mikkelsen, who went all out in "The Green Butchers," doesn't wink through Ivan's troubles. He inhabits the character's sadness without making the character sad, taking a similarly fresh handle on the villainy he brought to "Casino Royale " and to the more tender, observational acting he did in "After the Wedding." He and Thomsen, whose performance easily conflates the profane and humane, have a crackling night-and-day rapport that characterizes the movie's frivolous-but-not-that-frivolous ideas.
The notion of a hatemonger attempting to beat some sense into a man of God is absurd. But Jensen carries if off with cheek and sincerity. "Adam's Apples" is a farce of Euro-Christian tolerance, how too much blind acceptance can be a hazard. But Jensen isn't a complete cynic or a heretic. The film's about the limits of goodness, not about its absence. He believes in some of these people. He also believes that an opened heart should come with a pair of opened eyes.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog. 
