Director: Christopher Doli (Germany). Year of Release: 2024
A residential area on the better side of town. The middle of the night. A man leaves for the airport, trying not to wake the rest of the family. In the airport, he jokes with a work colleague about the colleague’s designer trainers. As day breaks, a woman struggles to leave the same house with her two kids in tow. In particular, her daughter Nina is reluctant to get dressed, get into the car and do whatever it is that her mother tells her.
Wolf has some bigshot job in the UN, dealing with people from industry who try to prevent any decisions on climate change which might cause them to pay out money. We see him at a UN climate meeting in New York where the PowerPoint slides tell us that they’ll be meeting again in Sharm El Sheikh. You can tell how important Wolf’s job Is (rather than how important the film claims it is) by thinking just how little was actually achieved at all these summits.
When Wolf comes home late one night from another work trip, his wife Vera is waiting up for him in their huge house. Vera is feeling unfulfilled and does not think that Wolf has been taking his far share of the childcare and housework. He tells her, not for the first time, that they’ve been through all this before, and he’d love to do more, but he’s too busy saving the planet. As Wolf and Vera try to blame each other for their upper class ennui, it’s hard to decide which to hate more.
The family react to Nina’s diagnosis of early onset motor neuron disease and the consequential development delay by ensuring that she spends more time with their friends. No, of course they don’t. This is a film which is so focussed on the sanctuary of family, that Nina has no friends. Neither do her parents. Well, there is Ben, who Wolf works with but they don’t seem to know anything about each other. Vera works remotely from Home so she doesn’t even have a Ben.
One one of her rare moments alone with her father, Nina puts on her cute face and says that her one wish in life is to have one million minutes with her father doing happy things. This at least gives your brain something to do while the film carries on with tiresome exposition (it’s just under 2 years, apparently). Maybe its Nina’s toothy smile, but she gets through to Wolf in a way in which her mother failed. Soon he is considering how he can spend more time with his family.
Wolf finds a solution which is just as simple as it is impossible to pretty much anyone without a well-paid yuppie job. He’ll move with his family to a luxury resort and both he and Vera will do their work remotely from a sunny beach. Wolf tells Nina to spin a globe and find their new home. After her first 2 choices land at Russia and North Korea, Nina finally makes the more acceptable choices of Thailand and Iceland.
But it’s not all easy, oh no. Sometimes, when Wolf is trying to spend quality time with his daughter, someone from the office rings. And seeing as he is unaware of the concept of just not answering the fucking phone, he misses a shared moment with his daughter watching beautiful fish on a Thai beach. At one time, the WiFi doesn’t even work. But in the next scene, they’re in a luxury hotel in Bangkok, so that problem is quickly dealt with.
While they are in Thailand, we do not hear the voices of any actual Thai people. There is the occasional shot of the family at dinner. Also at the table are a couple of brown skinned people. But they are just there for background decoration. The film is not about them. It is about how difficult life is for a white person forced to travel the planet because – what exactly? – maybe because the weather in Germany is a little too cold and wet for their taste,
About halfway through the film, Wolf and family move to Iceland. Here they do meet some of the (white) natives, who on the face of things are hard working artisans. They do carpentry and fire fighting and everything. The fact that the carpenters are doing up the piece of land which they bought or that the firefighter is actually the boss of the fire crew is neither here nor there. This is as close to workers as Wolf and Vera will ever come.
When capitalism finally collapses under the weight of its own excess, Ein Million Minuten is the film that future generations will show themselves to understand how it all happened. The trouble is, the film lacks any of the self-awareness that it needs to understand this. When he is not saving the environment in high powered meeting, Wolf is flying around the world or driving is family around Iceland in an SUV. No, it’s not the greatest problem but he is unaware of any contradiction.
There is at least one scene in which the film shows some awareness that Wolf may not be an absolute hero. Without any sense of irony, Vera accuses him of having unconscious privilege. While she does have a slight point – he just assumes that she will look after the cooking and childcare, while holding down a job – neither shows the slightest acknowledgement of the huge class privilege which they both enjoy. Most people do not – cannot – live like them.
And yet, for most of the time, we are expected to sympathise. Yes, Wolf should be a little more aware of the work that Vera puts in for the family and household, and we do see him snap when he decides to give up his job (Vera earns more than enough to make this an option) and get worn down by having to spend time with his own children. But any dramatic tension the film might have is easily solved by booking another flight or another expensive hotel.
What is Eine Million Minuten trying to tell us? On one level, it is that we should spend less time at work and enjoy time with family (and possibly the friends who Wolf and Vera seem incapable of winning). But it assumes that this is a choice available to most people – that we just go to work because we have nothing better to do. This inability to understand the lives of most people means that the film ends up lecturing and patronising us.
The fact that Eine Million Minuten is based on a true story and best selling book probably makes it even more annoying than it is already. It does not just moan about how terrible it is to be forced to work on Thai beaches and in front of Icelandic waterfalls. It is not just that we know that the yearly salaries of Wolf and Vera are in excess of what most of us would get in a lifetime. We must also accept that he was paid even more for the book, and even more cash is rolling in from the film rights.
Reviews of the film have been so far equivocal to ecstatic. One review even called it a drama for the broad masses. I think this shows both the privileged bubble in which many film critics live and the disdainful disregard they have for anyone outside this lifestyle. We are expected to love films about the neurotic insecurities of our social betters because that’s the best that we can aspire towards. We deserve better than this – both from our film makers and our critics.
CinePhil 