Sentimental Value

Grade: C+

A Little Prayer, out earlier this year, left some gigantic shoes to fill in the department of the family drama movie. I was eagerly awaiting Sentimental Value – hoping it would be another one like the aforementioned, or my beloved Once Around. I didn’t love the angle it took with its plot. A long-absent father returns to the picture, back in the lives of his daughters, now grown. Ok, sounds promising, I’m sold so far, what else ya got? He’s a film director, and he’s back to pitch his new script to his daughters, and even potentially convince one of them to star in it.

I am seeing Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve for the first time. I’ve somehow managed to have missed her until now, but she is lovely, awesome, and can carry a movie. She plays Nora, the older daughter of two – a professional actress of stage and screen, and the “other woman” in an affair with a married man. Her mother has just passed, which prompts the unexpected return of their father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård). He has a new script – one of his most personal projects. He initially wants Nora to appear in it, but when she declines, he has to look elsewhere.

My personal Best Supporting Actress list for 2025 is becoming populated with top-of-the-year performances buried in movies I wasn’t crazy about. Emily Blunt is there, for The Smashing Machine. If I had to give Sentimental Value one Oscar nomination, it would be for Elle Fanning, as a character similar to Natalie Portman’s in May December. In their respective films, they play a famous Hollywood star who comes in to take on a role that’s either based on – or flat-out is – someone from a real life, suburban family. She is plucky and charming, and gets to play two different kinds of emotional beats – stemming from either rehearsing a scene from the script, or from the actual outside drama that unfolds. After dialogue mostly existing in a foreign (for me) language, along comes Fanning, speaking English and injecting the movie with the most life it has. It’s like Dorothy has landed in Oz, and everything has turned to color.

It’s great to see a performance like this from Skarsgård, who might be doing his best work since Good Will Hunting. My favorite moment was the trick he plays on Fanning’s character. The movie-within-the-movie is being filmed at the house that had been in the family for a couple of generations. It’s where his mother took her life by hanging. He tells Fanning that she is sitting on the very stool she stood on that day, but we find out later that it was purchased at IKEA much more recently. Otherwise, Sentimental Value is too brooding and slow-burning for its own good. I usually enjoy the choice to go minimal with the score, but here, I bet it could have used more music.

The ending will be familiar to you if you saw Pain and Glory. It’s the same kind of fake-out. There were audible gasps from the audience when the reveal was handed to us on a silver platter, but I thought it was telegraphed in an obvious manner earlier. The exterior background tipped me off. The conclusion is a nice, optimistic one, but given the awards buzz surrounding the movie, it wasn’t up to snuff for me. I went in to Sentimental Value with loads of anticipation, which turned to patience and benefit of the doubt when it wasn’t initially delivering on the hype from the ads and reviews. Maybe it just has a slow start, and it will build to something – I thought. Finally, I descended into disappointment. I kept waiting for the film to elevate and bring me over the moon, but it just didn’t.

Grade: C+