Take Shelter from Melancholia
Lars von Trier’s new prank Melancholia collides with Amerindie Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter. Both films are about facing Armageddon, but it’s hard to prefer the attitude of either. Nichols (who made the surprisingly timely, heartfelt Shotgun Stories) charts the pulse of American dissatisfaction to a remarkable, recognizable degree. But von Trier’s Eurotrash decadence is so insistently pessimistic that this time his phoniness is almost captivating—it feels less annoying than Nichols’ sincerity.
Kirsten Dunst in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.
Make no mistake: Melancholia is not at all enjoyable—its title is especially unfunny because it’s meant to be a joke. A planet on course to crash into Earth is named Melancholia to match the depressed mood of a young bride (Kirsten Dunst) and her jealous, paranoid sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who are stuck on palatial, Marienbad-like grounds somewhere in Europe.
In Take Shelter, Ohio miner Curtis (Michael Shannon) suffers a nervous breakdown when he envisions storms and weather changes as signs of catastrophe, disrupting his work and family life.
There’s an unavoidable political dimension to Nichols’ fear, as there was in Shotgun Stories; his sense of terror seems to arise from a post-9/11 social dissatisfaction that most filmmakers, repeating blue state attitudes, don’t even think about. The paranoia in Take Shelter goes way beyond the mainstream media’s Hurricane Katrina apologetics. Something worse is coming, Nichols suggests, and it’s not just in Curtis’ head. (A church social freak-out turns him into a millennial prophet.) Given Curtis’ workplace distractions and income expenditures, the coming catastrophe is vaguely social, perhaps tied to the current recession.
Yet Nichols has no sense of metaphor (and thankfully lacks a political pundit’s shamelessness). Instead, his one-track realism—which felt powerful and inevitably tragic and cathartic in Shotgun Stories—becomes agitated and overwrought, especially when the naturalistic performances by Shannon, Jessica Chastain as his wife and Shea Whigham as a trusting coworker are put into exaggerated, horror-movie contexts. The mounting fear doesn’t gain credibility—it just seems as if Curtis has beamed up to the planet Melancholia.
But in von Trier’s perverse wedding party, a pathologically fickle bride, Justine (Dunst), offends her guests and cheats on her husband (Alexander Skarsgård), then indulges her sister and brother-in-law’s (Kiefer Sutherland) fears of the apocalypse. This allows von Trier to mock his own Dogme peers (1999’s The Celebration) while pointedly offering an anti-humanist retort to Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. It’s a hostile gesture that confirms that Demme’s life-force comedy had indeed uncovered the foundation of contemporary social anxiety and agape and so must be rebutted.
In von Trier’s smash-the-planet, chop-down-Malick’s-Tree-of-Life mode, he touches upon modern skepticism as well as age-old Christian anxieties to no perceivable purpose other than to deride them. Art mockery is this prankster’s stock-in-trade.
Von Trier, who is not untalented, makes pretty pictures of waste, dejection, hopelessness and entropy, first with a pre-credit montage of mysterious, frightening prophecies staged in slow-motion dioramas. These images are strikingly aestheticized but banal tableaux, the kind typically seen in music videos—which the audience then has to sit through again in von Trier’s dragged out, aimless narrative.
Melancholia’s glossy, stylized, repetitive slickness contrasts Nichols’ straightforward blue-collar anxiety. Von Trier’s joke is making the fantastic meet the mundane, but Nichols doesn’t go for jokes. He suffers with his Middle American characters, partaking of their eschatological neuroses. Von Trier and Nichols both dispense with a spiritual or religious explanation for their end-times visions, they simply wait for the end of the world; one with a sick grin, the other with a no more helpful sense of destiny.
How does one take shelter from Melancholia? Maybe by watching more substantive and stimulating movies like Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Colombiana and Attack the Block. Unfortunately, the art house pretense that got von Trier’s Melancholia into the New York Film Festival isn’t so different from the indie nihilism that Nichols succumbs to in Take Shelter. Both fail similarly: von Trier exploits the what’s-it that’s got Nichols aggrieved, and each film is a modern demonstration of secular panic in the face of the ineffable.
Curtis’ obsession with building a storm shelter recalls the mania that gripped Richard Dreyfuss’s Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. One of that film’s many rich levels suggested that Neary’s unknowable drive also came from a great, inexplicable inspiration—essentially an artistic impulse. In the end, von Trier’s bride and Nichols’ grunt are not artists or believers; they’re just fashionably doomed.
