Melancholia is bad. Not eye-searingly, infinite-nightmare-inducingly bad like director Lars von Trier’s previous film, Antichrist. Not god-awful-failed-experimental-film bad like von Trier’s The Idiots. It’s just bad in a dull, mediocre kind of way.
While the quality of the mad Dane’s filmic output varies wildly, all of his previous films have been massively provocative and interesting, whether it be the hipster-chic chalk outline stage set from Dogville or the over-the-top, piss-on-America theme of Dancer in the Dark. Come to think of it, almost all of von Trier’s previous works focus on how deplorable American society is, except his last two films — the astonishingly unhinged Antichrist and Melancholia.
Melancholia, while set in some loose, alternate universe America in which bosses who get invited to weddings feel like the after-party is the ideal platform for harassing star employees about work, doesn’t go so far as to unceremoniously shit on us. Instead, the film follows two sisters. Justine (Kirsten Dunst, All Good Things) is the one getting married and the one suffering from the titular case of the sniffles. Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg, The Tree) is the one with the loaded husband hosting the wedding, and the one who later takes in Justine after she suffers a depression-related breakdown.
Were it not for the planet that’s going to smash into Earth by the movie’s end, you’d almost think that Melancholia is a quiet character piece. But, of course, the mad, Nazi-sympathizing Danish director can’t stop there.
Why aim for realistic characters when you can settle for broad stereotypes and thinly sketched generalizations? And why settle for “drama” when you can smash a bloody planet into Earth and kill everything?
Partway through the second half of the film, Justine solemnly intones to Claire that all life is evil and only exists on Earth. Fascinating stuff, Lars. Maybe next time you could make your grand summation of life a little bit more ambiguous.
The problem here is that Melancholia is von Trier’s laziest work conceptually. Von Trier relies on an overriding idea or theme and a concrete structure to guide his films. Yet, in Melancholia, we get the world’s most tortuously prolonged and implausible wedding, which occupies half of the running time, followed by a passable, if somewhat shallow, introspective meditation on depression.
Instead of rigorous filmmaking, Melancholia instead relies on its characters to provide the drama that propels the film forward. Dunst and Gainsbourg strain mightily to support the film, each offering brilliantly naked (emotionally and physically for Dunst) performances that give the otherwise cold movie a human element.
The trouble is that the supporting characters are all irrational, illogical idiots. From a depression-as-an-apocalyptic-metaphor standpoint, that might work, but it impedes the movie’s drama and your ability to take the film seriously on almost any level, giving the entire film a rather insufferable yet simultaneously ludicrous tone.
All of this, of course, is in service to a rather weak characterization of depression that was accomplished somewhat successfully in Antichrist.
But, aside from all that bad stuff, Melancholia does mark a return for von Trier to gorgeous visual direction. Von Trier’s preferred digital cameras finally caught up with film cameras during his previous outing, but it is in Melancholia where von Trier truly flexes his abilities as a visualist.
The opening slow motion, effects-driven destruction of Earth from the planet Melancholia is breathtaking, impeccably set to a Wagner opera. The additional visualizations of space scattered throughout the film, and the general cinematography of the movie are also fantastic.
But all of the beauty, good performances and Wagner can’t cover up the rest of the film’s flaws. Melancholia is not awful, just bad, and that is the film’s biggest disappointment.
VERDICT: Melancholia, though well acted and pretty to look at, fails to either enthrall or provoke.
