The Big Screen (83 page)

Lars von Trier was born in Copenhagen in 1956 and came to prominence in 1984 with
The Element of Crime
, a mannered if not ostentatious thriller. He looked like a noir stylist hoping to develop an international career. But in the early 1990s he was a leading figure in the Dogme 95 movement, a northern European attempt to purify cinema. With Thomas Vinterberg, in 1995, he nailed a set of theses to the door to filmmaking: no extravagant commercial funding; no genres; shoot on location, not in a studio; sound must be recorded live; use color (because it is lifelike); there should be no opticals or special effects (stay with the world as is); the camera must be handheld; the director should not be credited.

This drive for integrity was dogmatic and shallow, but there was a germ of interest in every insistence: films had become absurdly expensive; Renoir had believed in locations and live sound; the Soviet cinema had restricted itself to state funding; many felt that Hollywood genres were archaic and inflated by effects; nearly every director was indifferent to whether other directors got credit. Von Trier lived by or ignored his Dogme in
Breaking the Waves
(1996),
Dancer in the Dark
(2000),
Dogville
(2003),
Antichrist
(2009), and then
Melancholia
.

I found
Melancholia
prolonged, pretentious, and insufferable. But in
Entertainment Weekly
, Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “A giant achievement. A work of genius. A movie masterpiece,” while in the
Wall Street Journal
, Joe Morgenstern called it “a film that sweeps you up and takes you out of yourself.” (Any critic knows that kind of rhetoric, and has used it, but it may be worth asking how far its suppositions conform with Dogme 95.)

Melancholia
is in three parts: there is a prologue, laden with Wagner's overture to
Tristan und Isolde
, a montage of images in which we see the impending collision of one planet with another. Much of this is beautiful, arresting, and very promising.

The second part is a wedding between Michael and Justine, at a grand country estate in Sweden. It may be a real place, but it seems as symbolic as Shaw's
Heartbreak House
. We meet the family, and the occasion is as awful as weddings often are. But the couple insist that they are happy. They kiss endlessly and they break away to have sex. Still, there is a flaw in the serenity: Justine is suffering from melancholy, depression, or bipolar disorder. It is not spelled out clinically, but Kirsten Dunst does an impressive if unsettling job at conveying the outer symptoms. (Characters on the big screen and in the bright light who lack energy quickly seem alien or anathema.) She becomes less gregarious or happy. She has sex with a passing acquaintance in a bunker on the estate's golf course. The marriage breaks up even as it is being celebrated.

The third part is named for Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), Justine's sister. The estate is owned by Claire and her wealthy husband, John (Kiefer Sutherland). The wedding is over. Justine is close to catatonia, but Claire is increasingly distraught because the planet of Melancholia is approaching Earth. Will there be a collision? John, who has a modest telescope and knows how to do the calculations, assures Claire that it will pass by safely. Justine moon-bathes on the bank of a stream in the woods, allowing us to see that Kirsten Dunst has an exceptionally beautiful body—I'm not sure this display is statistically associated with depression, though it can often be found in art movies looking to hold an audience.

I won't give away the ending: you should suffer yourself. At 136 minutes,
Melancholia
needs cutting—unless you feel it could go on forever. (J. Hoberman admitted in
The Village Voice
that “When I left the theatre, I felt light, rejuvenated and unconscionably happy.”) It is a simple enough story, granted that the resonance wants to be immense—its reach is quite like that of its close contemporary, Terrence Malick's
The Tree of Life
. Both films opened at Cannes in 2011, when
Tree of Life
won the Palme d'Or, while Kirsten Dunst took the prize for Best Actress. Prizes are foolish, we all agree, and those at Cannes have a record of eccentricity to live up to. But to reward Kirsten Dunst while not honoring Charlotte Gainsbourg is beyond eccentricity.

Melancholia
cost over $7 million, accumulated in small amounts from many sources, and when it opened in the United States, it did quite well: $270,000 from nineteen screens on its first weekend. After four weeks, as word and reviews spread, it had grossed $2 million. Although it deals with clinical melancholy and the end of the world, the film has a curious air of money. Just about every character is wealthy, well dressed, and amply provided with sleek household appliances. The common man or the huddled masses are nowhere to be seen, despite that Dogme severity. (Bourgeois audiences appreciate the screen's world looking nice. Poverty can upset them. These are legacies from advertising.)

The one item in the Dogme code that persists in
Melancholia
is the faith in handheld camera work. This seems like voodoo thinking. If a tripod counts as unfair technology, why pick up a camera at all? If the camerawork in the film is viscerally or neurologically disturbing, that is not necessarily art any more than a badly proofread version of
Paraside Lust
would be a literary breakthrough. The fixed base, or stability, of shots—in that they are anchored to a tripod—is a convention of order and respect and an aid to attention. If architecture is an art and a social function, isn't it best if the buildings don't fall down? If Facebook is a community, isn't it preferable that no one is hacking its intimate information?

You can see the film to make your contribution to the argument. But the most conventional character in
Melancholia
(though he cracks before the end) is the most orthodox of performers: it's Kiefer Sutherland as John. He's also the most believable and interesting person in the film, and I found this from Sutherland himself, who came to work with von Trier in a high state of anticipation. This comes from a published interview:

Kiefer Sutherland is a case worth studying. He was an actor for years, probably more notable in supporting parts (
A Few Good Men
, 1992; and
Freeway
, 1996) than when he starred in low-budget pictures. But in 2002 his life and his image altered as he became vital to one of the most intriguing and influential television series of the twenty-first century,
24
. As Jack Bauer, secret agent at the Counter Terrorist Unit, he was another “JB,” a taciturn superman who kept saving the world. But his world was vulnerable to technologies Bond had never thought of: not just nuclear wipeout, but data retrieval, surveillance, cell phones, and torture. I don't mean that American torture was new, but it was for the public, and in
24
it got a strange, uncritical attention that told us it had been there for a while without our noticing. The show had a striking first season, and a very good second, but it was pitching its own dramatic stakes so high that hysterical and inadvertent self-parody were likely.

Sutherland's Bauer was faultless and appealing in what was already an archaic acting style. He was also, from 2002–10, a producer on the show and one who took a close interest in the story line and the numbers. When he had done
A Few Good Men
(1992, playing the surly southern sergeant), he earned $250,000. By now—and there may be a
24
movie—he has a net worth of $65 million.

Good luck to him: a hit has always been ready to change the world for the lucky few. But
24
is part of a pattern of reiteration with raised blood pressure that affects us, too. Some of the executives (Alex Ganser, Howard Gordon) behind
24
moved on in 2011 to the series
Homeland
, on Showtime. Once again, the first season (which concluded on December 18, 2011) was something not to be missed. It resembled
24
in that it brought terrorist threats to the doors of American government. It went a little further in suggesting how American crimes had given a sense of justifiable revenge to the terrorists. Above all,
Homeland
was valuable in presenting a family context, with several female characters who were original and involving.

It's the story of a Marine sergeant, Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), who has been kept prisoner in Syria and Iraq by a terrorist for eight years. When he comes back to America, a very smart but troubled CIA agent, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), suspects that he has been turned in captivity and is now a terrorist in waiting in Washington, D.C. Brody has a family—a wife who has been having an affair in his absence, a young son, and a teenage daughter (Morgan Saylor) anxious to rebuild a relationship with her father.

The point about the show is that we cared deeply for maybe half a dozen characters, and as the series advanced, it became clear that Danes was giving a vivid and disconcerting performance as a deteriorating victim of bipolar illness. In every dramatic sense,
Homeland
cried out for resolution, maybe not as devastating as that in
Reservoir Dogs
(where no one is left alive), but with tragedies, damage, and even lessons or conclusions. I know, that recipe sounds formulaic or old-fashioned, but anyone who followed
Homeland
will know what I mean about the story's gathering need for a convincing ending—and the last episode of season one was not the normal hour, but ninety minutes.

In that twelfth episode, the show suffered from conflicting urges—to tidy up, while indulging a frenzy of implausibility—but it left all the key players available for a second season (announced at the end of October). Don't you want to see more of Carrie, Brody, and the others? Don't the actors and the writers deserve steady work? Aren't we making money? The answers are obvious, and you have to have known actors and writers to understand their insecurities. So Carrie will be on the brink again, until the brink becomes the cliff on which her integrity is hanging.

Still, in the business, the hourly reports on box office numbers for a first weekend are desperate or delirious. That is why there are always so many nervous people in the room called movies, increasingly unaware that their space might be part of a much larger house.
Jack and Jill
grossed about $26 million in its opening weekend (November 11–13). That was at the low end of expectation for an Adam Sandler picture. Interpreting these figures is habitual now but unreliable; it's more spin than history, yet our taste for so much discourse has shifted that way.
Jack and Jill
finished second on the weekend, about $7 million below
Immortals
, an R-rated swords-and-sandals epic. Some observers felt Sandler might have lost part of his regular audience to that film and to the way young males (the sixteen-to-twenty-four age range) were seeing fewer films and playing more video games. November 8 had also marked the release of the video game
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
, with $400 million in immediate sales in the United States and the United Kingdom. No movie has ever approached that number on a first weekend.

Call of Duty
had competition. Only a few days earlier,
Battlefield 3
had appeared, nearly as successful, and in the
New York Times
, Seth Schiesel said that “Visually the depth of field and rendering quality in
Battlefield 3
[made it]…the most visually realistic shooter on the market.” He added that “
Call of Duty
isn't trying to be realistic; it's trying to be fun.” He concluded his “critic's notebook” piece on the front page of the
Times
Arts section, with a color illustration: “Both games are ultimately about letting men have their virtual taste of combat without getting off the couch or up from the computer. Would many of us really prefer a draft?”