Melancholia

Melancholia ends when a rogue planet collides with the earth, wiping everything out entirely. This isn't a spoiler; it's a very established fact, one the movie itself gives away within the first five minutes. You have to know, going into Melancholia, that it ends with the total annihilation of the earth. Needless to say, it's a very dark and bleak movie. I knew this much going in. What I did not expect was that the film wasn't really about the end of the world at all. Instead, it was about depression.

That's right. Director Lars von Trier made a movie about the end of the world not to explore what it would be like for society to face the apocalypse, but instead to compare two sisters and their personalities before and after they realize they are doomed. That's certainly a high-concept movie, and not something for everyone, but for me the whole thing worked pretty well. The film takes place over two parts. In the first part, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) arrives at her wedding reception with her new husband and for an hour or so we just get to see her sink further into unhappiness and depression. Her sister, Claire, is the one hosting the reception, and she's none too happy about Justine's general sadness throughout the event. Justine spends most of the evening either trying to be alone or otherwise not reacting to the world around her. It's an amazing performance by Kirsten Dunst. She isn't being aggressively sad or mopey or intentionally distant. She's just devoid of emotion and empty, barely registering when her mother openly mocks the idea of marriage during a toast or when her boss chastises her recent work performance right there at her wedding reception. It's ostensibly the happiest day of her life, and Justine is just deeply, deeply depressed. Her husband, who has presumably been seeing this build up for some time now, gives up and just leaves along with all the other guests when the wedding ends. Really, only Claire seems to want to try to snap Justine out of her funk. Nothing works, but at least the big sister cares enough to try. So, to recap, halfway through the movie we've already got a severely depressed person surrounded by nasty family members and abandoned by a new husband at a party no one is enjoying. Fun, right? And remember - no one even knows about the end of the world yet!

The second part of the movie takes place in the days after the wedding, where a nearly catatonic Justine is staying with Claire, Claire's husband John (Kiefer Sutherland), and their son. News of the approaching rogue planet comes to light, but John assures everyone that there will be no collision, and that it will be an exciting and beautiful night time fly-by visible from the earth. Long story short (seriously, the movie really started to drag during this second half, as we spent another hour mostly just mining the depths of Justine's despair), turns out there will of course be a catastrophic collision after all. And here's where the tables turn. Claire and John react like most sane people would, and panic, and worry, and fill with despair. John just straight up kills himself once he learns his predictions were inaccurate. But Justine seems to find some kind of beautiful inner peace over all this. For the movie's final twenty minutes or so, it's Justine taking care of Claire. It's Justine, utterly tranquil and calm, trying to make the end of the world as unhorrible an experience as possible for her sister and nephew. Which is kind of bleakly sweet, especially relative to the rest of the movie. Anyway, the collision comes and everything is incinerated. Roll credits.

So, yeah. Melancholia was bleak and depressing and also, frankly, a little boring. It's very easy to compare to a Terrence Mallick movie, and particularly to The Tree of Life. That movie featured a whole lot of stillness and tranquility, but was filled with positive spiritual vibes. It began with the Big Bang itself; here, we're sad as hell and staring down the end of the world, but the same stillness and quietness exists in most shots and most scenes. I read that Melancholia premiered at Cannes just two days after The Tree of Life, and that audiences were stunned, almost as if Lars von Trier had seen The Tree of Life and then gone out and made a direct response to that movie in just two days.

I've run long here, thanks largely to a bunch of plot explanation, but I don't want to wrap this up without really driving home how well von Trier and Dunst were able to sketch out and act out, respectively, such a genuinely believable embodiment of clinical depression. I struggled with some minor bouts of depression myself in both high school and college, and I've known a few people who've been affected far more deeply than I have, and this film just nails the condition. Everything from the antisocial despondence to the inability to motivate oneself to do, well, anything, really, is all on display here. As is the silver lining to the condition - if you can call it that - which is that once you're numb to everything, bad news doesn't really affect you all that much. I want to be clear here - Justine isn't welcoming the end of the world with open arms because she's suicidal; she's just calmed by it in a way that can't possibly make sense unless you're able to empathize with such a sad character. When you feel nothing, and "nothing" is all that everything is about to become, imagine how calming and peaceful that might be. It's sad as hell that anyone could react that way to the end of the world, but there's a certain inhuman calmness there that you may be able to appreciate as well.

It wasn't the most entertaining or enjoyable movie I've seen, but Melancholia is certainly one I'll think about for years and years to come.