'Hamsun'

Swedish director Jan Troell’s film (he did "The Emigrants" and "The New Land") is about one of Norway’s most controversial characters of the Nazi era: Knut Hamsun. Hamsun, the aging Nobel Prize winner (played with the usual masterful, ashen presence by Max Von Sydow) became an embarrassingly staunch supporter -- a sort of aging Scandanavian posterboy -- of the Nazis.

The other infamous countryman was V. Quisling (who also has an appearance here), the puppet ruler who betrayed his nation to the Germans and literally gave his name to patriotic treachery. But the central story, which begins in 1935 and covers the last 17 years of Hamsun’s life, is about Hamsun’s essential flaw: his inability to understand Hitler’s maniacal and antisemitic agenda.

Although the movie spends considerable time studying his reactions, ravings and musings, and invests much time with Hamsun’s long-suffering wife (the assured Ghita Norby), who was obliged to play supportive spouse to a tyrant, it stays surprisingly constricted and remote.

In its lengthy depiction of a cold, deluded soul, the movie itself fails to register much of a temperature -- although Hamsun’s onetime meeting with the Fuhrer himself (Ernst Jacobi) is a fascinating encounter between two deeply deluded men.

HAMSUN (Unrated) — Contains some war atrocity.