Joel Fry-days
The Captain, Denmark
GIF from @derekstilinski, copy-pasted from your post because I fought with the GIF search function and couldn't get any of your GIFs from this movie to come up, arghhhh!
This was a strangely hard movie to track down, and I’m not really sure why. Like, yes, it’s a pretty small film, but I’ve watched stuff for actors that feels more obscure than this but was easier to find. Part of it, I suppose, is just the title, which makes it very difficult to Google. (I’ve also seen it called One Way to Denmark, which is marginally better.) But from what I can tell, it’s never been released on DVD, not even in the UK. It’s a perfectly respectable little movie, though!
Herb’s life in Wales feels like it’s circling the drain. No job, just lost his benefits, divorced, doesn’t get to see his kid, his mom constantly berates him, and the guy in the flat above him plays loud music all night. When he gets mugged, he doesn’t even have anything good worth stealing. That’s the state of mind Herb is in when he sees a news story about Denmark’s lavish “open prison” system, where inmates get to leave the prison every day to work and then return to a cell with a private bathroom/shower, a flatscreen TV, and their own key. Feeling at the end of his rope, Herb decides that the best way to improve his life is to go to Denmark and get himself arrested.
The film does a nice job of being both funny and sad, sometimes giving us a strong helping of both in the same scene. It’s not just that everything is going wrong in Herb’s life. It’s that he feels hopeless of it getting better. He feels like there’s nothing left for him, nobody cares, and nobody will help him. His plan is ridiculous and ill-advised, which he himself realizes—he has to rush into a Danish public bathroom three times as he psychs himself up to rob a bank with a BB gun—but at the same time, it’s informed by the sort of crushing life exhaustion that comes with depression.
The Captain (actual name Kirk) is Herb’s best friend. He's one of the few people in their dead-end town who got out, traveling the world while working on ships, but he’s just returned to look after his father with dementia. Since Herb embarks on his adventure alone, that means the other Welsh characters stay in Wales, so we only see the Captain in two scenes. As such, Joel Fry probably isn’t in the movie for more than five or six minutes, but I still enjoy his performance here.
It’s nice that we’re introduced to the Captain when he’s enjoying a quiet moment, sitting outside and gently holding one of his pigeons, because we quickly see that he has a lot on his plate. When Herb visits him for a catch-up, the Captain has to go off and help his dad three separate times. He’s stressed and impatient about it, urging his dad to shut up when he talks about conversations that presumably never happened, and he admits to Herb that he’s not sure what he’s going to do.
Joel Fry is also using a Welsh accent here, allegedly. As an actor, Joel doesn't do a lot of accent work in general, and on the occasions when he does take a big departure from his own accent, the results tend to be...interesting (see: his stab at generic American accents in American Sweatshop and Haunting of the Queen Mary.) For this movie, the best way I can describe it is that it sounds like Joel “doing Welsh” rather than his character being Welsh.