With regards to smoking the same campaign has been run against it in Norway as elsewhere in the west. It is banned in pubs, restaurants and most public places, at least indoors. There are also the same public health warnings as elsewhere including for pregnant women.
Having said that I suspect that a significant portion of Norwegians are far more relaxed than their "authorities" and would prefer not being told what to do by governments and experts. Personally I barely noticed the smoking and drinking, especially because the movie is an adaptation of Ingvar Ambjørnsen`s writings which have dealt with dark topics like psychiatry, drugs, child abuse and prostitution for decades. He is what we call here a social-realist and not in the business of describing role models but reality. He is in my view under no obligation to write morally uplifting but attempts to describe what he sees.
There are in Norway, for all our vaunted health care, many who struggle economically, socially and otherwise and many of these people do actually smoke and drink, even during pregnancies. This is what is being described in Elling and not the sensible and propagandized upper crust. These would be using cocaine and drinking brandy instead I suppose.
As for social services I have worked for 12 years in various psychiatric facilities in and around Oslo and the prevailing ideal is indeed something called "normalization", roughly translated, meaning that those under care are meant to be given residence in their home communities. In the case of Elling this means that because he was born in Majorstua, a district in Oslo, he is therefore granted by law the right to live there instead of in a massive hospital outside the city as he would previously have been forced to. Although this sounds great it leads to isolation for many, and less care than some need. Even people with far more debilitating conditions than Elling will be moved to single apartments or apartment complexes with others in a similar situation, which is expensive and works from extremely well to not at all depending on the case.
The old ways of sequestering the mentally challenged in large institutions had other drawbacks which you probably know of from the US, but it did provide communities, dysfunctional though they often were, as well as centralized experience and competence for care givers of all kinds.
In addition to this, although Norwegian health care is very generous to those that qualify a lot of people still fall through the cracks, either because of unclear diagnosis, not being considered "bad" enough to need help or just because of living in the wrong place etc. Someone far worse off than Elling could in practice receive little or no help, while those competent at filling out forms and jumping through the hoops of the system could receive more.
This is one of the problems of a well funded social welfare system which is top heavy with bureaucracy like you wouldn`t believe. And bear in mind that without at least one clear psychiatric diagnosis Elling would not have been eligible for communal living space. Having such a diagnosis would make it virtually impossible for him to find employment, ever. In other words it is a trap as well as salvation yet something about which public debate is touchy in Norway. For people watching from across the pond it is apparently easy to idolize European health care while missing the significant social control and therefore power such a system exercises and just how expensive it is to run. My impression of it, and the reason I have quit, was that the bureaucracies seem to grow exponentially, thereby reducing the amount of tax money spent on actually trying to improve the lives of downtrodden people. In this context a climate of "saving money" gradually established itself from the end of the 90s onwards, a culture which has now developed to a point where essential care is denied to many, in my opinion due to excessive administration.
Regarding the poem it is more or less correctly translated above, but I`ll do it again with better propositions:
Vi fant henne i trappen
håret
en sort ravnevinge som vinden slo
mot det uvaskede linoleumet.
Vi la henne på sengen
og så at englene allerede hadde besvangret henne
We found her on the stairs
the hair
a black raven`s wing the wind struck
against the unwashed linoleum
We laid her on the bed
and saw the angels had already impregnated her
Other than that I can only say that Elling is a far better movie when you understand Norwegian, since much of the quirkiness of the protagonists is lost in translation. Only a Norwegian can truly appreciate just how inappropriate Kjell Bjarne`s behavior really is, and just how Norwegian post-war culture has inhabited the neurotic mind of Elling. Note for example how the picture of former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland hangs symmetrically above his kitchen table. An American might imagine that to be his mother, to whom he was otherwise attached. He also has several books about this woman and seems semi-obsessed both with her and the Norwegian labor movement in general. Translated into American society this would be about the same as being obsessed with Gerald Ford or Ed Meese and therefore not necessarily a sign of mental health.
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