Around the end of the ranking year, you tend to get locked into your idea of which films make up your top ten and which make up your bottom five. And by "you" I mean "me" because you, the actual person reading this, probably don't bother yourself with any of this type of obsessiveness.Watching Lars von Trier's The House That Jack Built on Friday night, I wondered if I might need to rethink some of that.
Not my top ten. My bottom five.
In fact, for a time, I thought this was lining up to be my worst movie of the year.
Which gave me pause. Considerable pause.
You see, that's just what von Trier wants me to do.
The bastard.
Cinema has a number of enfant terribles who make movies that push our buttons in similar ways, but von Trier is definitely the terrible-est of them. Ever since he got kicked out of Cannes for saying nice things about Hitler, it's become clear that all that talent masks a guy who just wants to figure out new ways of pissing us off. If he's not pissing us off he's not really alive, he thinks.
Not that there's no value to making art that provokes and pisses off. But von Trier's approach to it seems to be particularly juvenile. He calculates every filmmaking decision and every comment to assess what will make proper society faint. It's not only predicable, but it's actually boring.
And "boring" was easily the first word that came to mind to describe the over-long serial killer flick The House That Jack Built, which clocks in at 150 minutes for no reason other than the fact that von Trier has always felt it necessary to indulge every little whim he may have. Okay, not always -- this was not what the man was doing when he made terrific films like Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. In fact, even as recently as Melancholia I don't think he was anywhere near this creatively wasteful. Now, though, he elongates scenes and goes on tangents like he's being paid by the minute of celluloid he produces.
Never mind that this film actually includes a self-aggrandazing montage of clips from his own previous films. The ego of it all.
Watching a film that seemed both boring and misogynistic -- and no, Lars, you can't undercut the accusations of misogyny just because you address them directly in your dialogue -- I was inclined to think that this is the type of movie it's worth taking a stand about in naming your worst of the year. It's dramatically lethargic and it puts bad things into the world.
Then I thought, "Shit, that's just feeding into von Trier's narrative."
If I hate his film I give him even more power than if I love it. He's like Trump. Whether you love him or hate him, you are inflating him either way.
Fortunately, particularly in the second half, von Trier does some things that interested me enough to avoid any real consideration of this as my worst of the year. In the end, I did not even give it only one star. One-point-five stars was where I landed. When the film goes from mostly realistic to obviously absurd and fantastical, it helps recontextualize some of what he's doing, trending it toward noble failure territory rather than just the ghettos of misanthropy. The grotesque imagery itself had some really chilling moments, such as the taxidermy scene, which I have to credit in some form.
Really, though, no matter what I say about von Trier, it's not going to cut him. Of course part of that is because he will never read this. But even if he did, it wouldn't shame him. Like Trump, he's already heard every variation on every insult anyone could deliver toward him. It just fuels him to make another unmistakably von Trierian film.
And as much as I'm tired of this guy's shtick, he does make valuable movies from time to time. I don't mind telling you that I'm actually considering Melancholia for the "best of the 2010s" list I release a year from now, honoring my favorite 25 films of the decade. That I watched it just a few months ago and haven't ruled it out for this list tells you something about whether I really want this guy to go away or not.
More than anything I just want him to figure out something that's genuinely useful to say, and not just useful for making decent people hyperventilate.
No comments:
Post a Comment