Louder Than Bombs movie review (2016)

The baby hand belongs to the new son of Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg), a birth that has turned his father Gene (Gabriel Byrne, doing his best work since “In Treatment”) into a grandpa and his brother Conrad (Devin Druid) into an uncle. The arrival of a new branch in this family tree spurns memories of the lost matriarch of this clan, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), but it also sends Jonah off on his own unique path. Major events like birth and death have a way of redefining the way we perceive the world, and not in a treacly moral-message-movie way, but even in just the way we practically interact with one another. Perhaps realizing that being a father really closes a chapter on his youth, Jonah rekindles an affair with someone from his past, a woman named Erin (Rachel Brosnahan), who happens to be losing her mother.

Meanwhile, the younger Conrad is adrift. He doesn’t have many friends in high school, and can’t connect with his father, who is hiding the fact that he’s sleeping with Conrad’s teacher, Hannah (Amy Ryan). Gene tries to call Conrad, and even follows him around town to see what he’s doing. When he reaches him and asks him where he is, Conrad, sitting alone on a swing set, lies and says he’s with friends. It breaks a father’s heart. Conrad is fascinated by a girl in his class named Melanie (Ruby Jerins), sometimes even thinking she’s the magical key to his future. Trier’s film even dips into magical realism, such as when Conrad moves his hand like a magician and Melanie’s hair blows in the wind. Sometimes, especially in our most egocentric teen years, we think we can make the object of affection's mind move because want it to. In a sense, the world revolves around Conrad—his unaware crush, his avatars in the online game he plays every night, his grief over the loss of his mother—and his journey in "Louder Than Bombs" is one of learning that other people have needs, wants and secrets as well.

A story is coming out in the New York Times that will tell “the true story” about Isabelle, who died in a car accident. Did she kill herself? Was she meeting a lover? Jonah and Gene know the truth but have kept it from Conrad, and they disagree over whether or not he’s ready to learn it.

How do we remember those we lost? It’s often not like the big moments of typical Hollywood cinema but a minor one, like Conrad’s beautiful memory of his mother pretending not to see him hiding behind some clothes on a line. And how do we capture grief? Can photography, fiction or film possibly convey that which cannot really be put into words? Trier wisely knows the limitations of his form, even including a line like, “Mom once showed me how she could change the meaning of a picture by framing it differently.” He has not made a movie that purports to have any answers, doing what Isabelle did in that he frames a specific story for universal purpose.