Review: Stockholm Is Held Hostage by Its Maker’s Double-Edged Sword

The real-life attempted bank robbery at the center of writer-director Robert Budreau’s Stockholm is famous for originating the term “Stockholm syndrome,” a psychological phenomenon in which hostages align with their captors as a subconscious survival tactic. Riffing on Daniel Lang’s New Yorker article “The Bank Drama,” Budreau changes the characters’ names but sticks to the loose outline of the story, in which a man stormed the Sveriges Kreditbanken bank in Stockholm in 1973, taking hostages and demanding money as well as the release of an incarcerated criminal friend. Perhaps overly conscious of his film’s similarity to Sidney Lumet’s monumental Dog Day Afternoon, which is also partially concerned with Stockholm syndrome, Budreau opens Stockholm with text asserting the story’s truthfulness and absurdity. This is a small but integral flourish, as it signals the permission that Budreau has given himself to treat the robbery as a joke.

The jokiness is a double-edged sword. In cinema, bank robberies are often frenetic reflections of the filmmakers’ desperation to make ancient clichés come alive, so Budreau’s studied casualness provides a kind of relief. He understands that the story of the Stockholm robbery has inspired countless crime narratives, and so he treats it as a framework for horsing around—a way of saying “we assume you can’t get enough of these tropes.” Having a particularly high time is Ethan Hawke, who stars as Lars Nystrom (the robber’s real name is Jan-Erik Olsson). As Lars, Hawke wears a ridiculous wig and sunglasses and moves in big gestures that are unusual for this interior actor. Lars, rather than Hawke, is always telegraphing, as the former’s enthralled with American pop culture and is desperate to be a tough guy, though his essentially sweet temperament will figure into his arrest and capture.

Lars is a kind of holy fool, then, and this characterization is also a leftover from Dog Day Afternoon, as Al Pacino’s character in that film was a delusional yet authentic romantic. Hawke can mix vulnerability and dangerousness with remarkable subtlety, as he displayed in Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, but here his enjoyable vaudeville is ultimately shallow. Ten minutes into Stockholm, we know all there is to know about Lars, at least all that matters, as Budreau’s flippancy doesn’t allow Hawke’s performance to evolve. The filmmaker is less interested in portraiture than he is in the usual 1970s drag: references, guns, and clothes and hair that announce “period piece” in all caps. (In this context, Lars’s lame wig, which he occasionally abandons, suggests a reflexive joke.)

At least Hawke is allowed to be dynamic, and the visceral pleasure he seems to take in performing puts a bit of juice into the film. The other actors don’t fare as well, such as Noomi Rapace as Bianca, Lars’s primary hostage and love interest, and Mark Strong as the jailed compatriot who Lars demands be freed. Rapace and Strong are cast as types they’ve played far too many times: In the case of the former, it’s the strong, essentially anonymous beautiful woman in peril, and for the latter, it’s a villain of sorts whose inscrutability is less mysterious than dull. Meanwhile, the other hostages barely matter. Forget Dog Day Afternoon, as Stockholm doesn’t even clear the bar set by F. Gary Gray’s tense and exciting The Negotiator.

Stockholm has one distinctive quality: It suffers from Stockholm syndrome itself. The detectives and government officials who negotiate Lars’s demands are vilified as cold bureaucrats who endanger the hostages out of a prideful refusal to legitimize Lars, and indeed, their actions are negligent and occasionally even appalling. Lars, however, is let off the hook by the filmmakers as a romantic hero even though he’s the person who took the hostages at gunpoint. A telling sign of Stockholm’s strangeness: Lars’s offer to clothe Bianca in a bulletproof vest and shoot her non-fatally is accepted by Budreau as a courtly gesture.