Review of Melancholia (2011) by J.j. W — 08 Jul 2012

Melancholia is an exercise in the absurd that gets so self indulgent that it doesn't quite truly connect with its characters as much as it thinks it does. Similar to Malick's Tree of Life, Melancholia is a very extreme film that borderlines on the avant-garde.

Despite that, the movie strangely feels mundane and empty. Based on my observations, this is largely due to a script that treats its subject material like a Shakespearean tragedy when, ultimately, the character's own plight and anguish seems oddly trivial and childish.

Kirsten Dunst's unhappy wedding seems weirdly undramatic and confusing as we're never established why she's unhappy to be there to begin with. You can argue that the point of that would be to throw us into these character's lives in order to give us a sense of how their lives were quickly cut short.

Yet, the most basic of common sense solutions to these situations that the characters finds themselves in are avoided for reasons unbeknownst to the audience. There's subtlety and there's incomplete characterization.

Melancholia provides too little information to the viewers in order for the drama to function effectively. I respect writer and director Lars von Trier tremendously, but this film just seems like an incomplete story slapped on with an Armageddon premise just for the sake of doing something weird or different.

The second part of the film also drags as we already know what will happen and the movie seems to only be interested in setting a dramatic mood rather than develop characters. It's also somewhat shocking to see von Trier resort to the "women are emotional wrecks when anything major happens".

Kirsten Dunst's character seems unbelievably immature and childish while Charlotte Gainsbourg's character is just an emotional faucet of tears and outbursts. It's a cheap and lazy way to write drama (and women) and von Trier is better than that.

The music is also incredibly heavy handed playing the few motifs of "Tristan und Isolde" over and over and over again. It's almost as if von Trier just wanted us to be so incredibly sad for these characters but the unfortunate fact of the matter is, most of these people act so annoyingly juvenile that it just sucks all the drama out of it.

Melancholia is not as deep or insightful as it thinks it is and it just ends up wasting our time. The only thing that saves the movie is the marvelous visuals but if you were to read it as a script it'd be one hell of a long read and that's when you know you don't really have a solid story underneath you.