Lars von Trier's Melancholia, in cinemas now, is a masterpiece, and Tintin is old-school, big-screen fun.
Melancholia
The frame story for the 2011 year in film writes itself: Terrence Malick made The Tree of Life; Lars von Trier made Melancholia. The origin of the universe; the end of the world. Creation and destruction! Hope and despair! Endless musical variety and one endlessly repeated bit of Wagner!
But it’s such an obvious pairing. I have a better one. Since they’re going to be playing in New Zealand around the same time and neither ought to be missed, why not contrast a high-art symphony of despair with a pop-art celebration of can-do youthful energy? I give you the true opposite poles of 2011 in cinema: Melancholia and Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. I urgently advise you watch them in that order.
Much has been made of von Trier’s own brush with crippling depression, and the subsequent straw-into-gold alchemy he worked upon it by using it as the basis for this film. Much has also been made of his declaration at Cannes for the film’s launch that he felt some sympathy for Hitler. But even without this latest demonstration that nothing, nothing von Trier says in public should ever be taken seriously, or indeed listened to, the reductive spiritual autobiography route is not the right path to take in responding to Melancholia. The film would not become less profound or less beautiful if we found out tomorrow (and we might) that its director just read a book about depression once.
It would be misleading to lean too hard on the words “profound” and “beautiful”, although God knows it’s tempting. If you hung around the theatre exit after a Melancholia screening, you’d see wall-to-wall expressions of slack-jawed lost-for-words amazement, and the film opens just as strongly as it closes. (Some overseas reviews have dismissed the images von Trier achieves in these sequences as bombast, as though heart-piercing beauty were a stylistic stunt, like going too heavy on the italics.)
But the real power of the film is in the non sequitur that takes us from the opening vision of the apocalypse to a hilariously disastrous high society wedding. The world is ending; also, the in-laws are feuding at the dinner table. What? The comedy of awkwardness that ensues rides high on expert casting – Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt are particularly good as the parents of the bride – and so it takes a while to register that the bride, Justine (Kirsten Dunst, in a career-best performance), is reacting oddly not because there’s so much oddness to react to but because she’s clinically depressed. The mismatches of mood we experience as the film segues from grand tragedy to trivial comedy and back again echo Justine’s inability to feel what she ought, on her wedding day, to be feeling. Although the film opens with portents of total planetary obliteration, it isn’t really about the end of the world. It’s about being locked inside your own head. And I’m afraid, as exasperating as von Trier can be, it’s a masterpiece.
The Adventures of Tintin, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2011
I won’t make the same claim for The Adventures of Tintin. The film creaks a bit in its first 20 minutes; Thompson and Thomson, seemingly a gift to any screen adaptation, fall inexplicably short of hilarity; and the scene where Tintin despairs and Captain Haddock talks him round is synthetic Hollywood bunk.
But these are barnacles (non-blistering) on the hull of a vessel fit for the high seas. The animation is magnificent, the voice acting is splendid (Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock, especially). And even though the plot has maddened purists by fusing three of the books together, its zestfully choreographed action sequences capture something true to Herge’s spirit, a fluid narrative joy that revels in the mad accumulation of coincidences. Spielberg seems more at ease, and more in love with the craft of visual storytelling, than he’s been for many a year. This is a pure blast of old-school big-screen fun.
MELANCHOLIA, directed by Lars von Trier (click here for theatres and times); THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN (click here for theatres and times), directed by Steven Spielberg.
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