I have now seen both movies and it turns out I was both right and wrong. I didn't like either of them and will not - unless someone puts a gun to my head - sit through both of them ever again. But at the same time, both movies were so singular in their approach, so idiosyncratic, so beautifully shot, so weird, and so "out there" that I don't feel like their collective four-plus hours was a complete waste of time. In a year that continues to suffer from a dearth of good movies, complaining and laughing about two audaciously weird films is the closest I'll ever get to cinematic satisfaction.
So allow me to take this a step further and decide which of the two garish and beautiful movies were more interesting. In other words, which of the two movies are "good-weird" as opposed to just "weird-weird"?
To make sure you are able to follow the following dissection, here is the Colonial Mental Movie Weirdness Index to serve as your guide:
Good-Weird
Level One: Mulholland Drive (by David Lynch)
Level Two: The Unbelievable Truth (by Hal Hartley)
Level Three: Ice Cream (a short film by Louis C.K.)
Weird-Weird
Level One: No Such Thing (by Hal Hartley)
Level Two: Pinoy Blonde (by Peque Gallaga)
Level Three: Moulin Rouge (by Baz Luhrmann)
With that, let's now get to the breakdown - A Comparative Analysis on the Weirdness of "Melancholia" and "The Tree of Life":
The End of the World vs. The Big Bang
"Melancholia" opens with an inpired, "holy-shit-this-is-absolutely-magnificent" slow-motion montage of the final moments before the end of the world. We see Kirsten Dunst in different states of eerie calmness, Charlotte Gainsbourg in helpless panic, and a heavenly body colliding slowly with the Earth. It's totally arresting and absolutely gorgeous.
Yet, I'm giving this round to "The Tree of Life" for its Big Bang opening that just has no precedent whatsoever. We will see another four to five slow-motion montages set to the music of some German classical composer before we see another hypnotic sequence of the cosmos coming to life, mixed with beautifully shot scenes from 1950s Middle America. There is just nothing like the opening scenes to "The Tree of Life" in cinema history. Sorry, Lars Von Trier, but Terrence Malick just out-insaned you on this one.
Dogme vs. Michael Bay
Lars Von Trier has pretty much abandoned his Dogme "Vows of Chastity" bullshit since years ago, except for one: the hand-held camera. He just can't let that one go. To be fair, Von Trier's movies are always about suffering, one way or another, and the hand-held approach is always appropriate when following his characters who all happen to be in a constant state of panic and fear. Malick, on the other hand, is the Michael Bay of the arthouse - his swooping, panning, craning, and hovering camerawork knows no rest. In "The Tree of Life", this shtick is impressive for the first 45 minutes, then gets really grating for the rest of the movie. I don't know. I have a quick-trigger motion sickness and both of these movies made me want to run to the bathroom even before the credits rolled. So I guess this one's a tie.
Big Estate vs. Small Town
"The Tree of Life" featured a middle class small-town family, its middleness and smallness perhaps made more conspicuous by the fact that Malick is trying to make the human element in his movie look really small as he juxtaposes it with scenes of the cosmos and nature. Or at least that seemed like his inentions midway through the film until Brad Pitt's and young Sean Penn's omnipresence made you think: "Wait...you just told us that we're all small compared to God and all his sublimity, and now you're making us care for this vague kitchen sink drama? Are you high?"
While Malick's milieu pretended to make sense, Von Trier's sprawling country estate, 18-hole golf course decadence feels purely ornamental. The recession-mired critic might be tempted to see this as a metaphor for the capitalist system or the upper one percent that is headed for an unavoidable apocalypse. But that assumes that Von Trier actually cares about the external world, let alone what other people think. I think that "Melancholia's" insular, geographically-indifferent, and timeless (save for the occassional laptop, this movie could have been set at any random time over the last 40 years) setting serves its purpose perfectly - not by making us feel better about the end of the world by watching a bunch of rich assholes die, but because it traps the entire movie's consciousness within these rich assholes' point of view. That's called focus, Mr. Malick. Lars just took you to school on this one.
Kirsten Dunst planet-bathing naked vs. Jessica Chastain floating in mid-air
This seems like a rout in favor of Kirsten Dunst and her first ever (that I am aware of) nude scene, right? But this is a weird-off, and among the two non-sequitur scenes, Jessica Chastain floating in mid-air for no reason is definitely far weirder. Not just for the sheer weirdness of the scene, but also with the way Malick edited it as a mere throwaway in the middle of one of the movie's 378 montages.
Charlotte Gainsbourg vs. Jessica Chastain
Both movies barely avoided being unbearable for exactly the same reasons: (1) Their goregeous photography and (2) Their lead actresses. Both Charlotte Gainsbourg and Jessica Chastain stole the movie from their more prominent co-stars, submitting understated performances that made the quiet internal turmoil bleed outside their bodies and into the screen.
Charlotte Gainsbourg takes this one, though, because her character went through a change that gave her more range to work with. Whether it was the reserved, even-keeled older sister in Part One or the falling-off-the-rails wife and mother in Part Two, Gainsbourg was completely convincing. The best part of her performance is that she hardly seems to be trying to act, which is the greatest acting skill anyone can ever have.
The Wedding vs. The Dinosaurs
One of the many reasons why these two movies felt weird is that we are conditioned to consume movies in three acts. Unless you were raised inside a bomb shelter with nothing but VHS tapes of Luis Buñuel films, this is true for everybody. "Melancholia" and "The Tree of Life" played out in just two acts, which probably made them seem longer than they actually were. The former's first act involved a wedding that deteriorated as the day went on and the latter's involved a detailed re-enactment of the birth of the universe, complete with dinosaurs.
As delightfully random as "Melancholia's" first half was, this round still goes to "The Tree of Life" because its first half was just pure joy. It was very straight-forward, almost like a very expensive National Geographic documentary; yet it was so moving. It was the most spiritual part of the movie and it didn't even feature any humans. If only the second half never happened...
The Ridiculous vs. The Sublime
...then we'll have a truly unforgettable movie. The problem with "The Tree of Life" is that we were promised to be overwhelmed by the sublime. Malick set it up in a way that it felt like the movie would be one long simulation of the human experience - that all our insecurities, all our worries, and all our frailties mean nothing next to the vastness of the cosmos. But the people representing the humans in this movie happened to be hugely unrelatable. What happened to the kid? Which kid? Why do they always look so miserable? What the hell is happening???
"Melancholia" had an intention that was (a) less ambitious, (b) less confused, and (c) more interesting: it wanted to portray the idea of melancholy in its purest form. How do you do it? By using the apocalypse as a litmus test. It's easy to play up the cliché of death being The Great Equalizer in a film about the end of the world, and thus playing the same sublime card that "The Tree of Life" bumbled with. But Von Trier went the other way: in the face of death, the depressed are superior to those who are content with life. Those who have nothing left to lose are incapable of fearing the prospect of nothingness. Those who have nothing left to lose are the ones truly capable of embracing the sublime (and apparently bathing naked in the light of an anomalous planet).
What really sets "Melancholia" apart from "The Tree of Life" is that - whatever the hell it is trying to say - it doesn't take itself too seriously. From the impromptu golf course sex scene and the wedding arranger who refuses to look at Kirsten Dunst because "she ruined my party" to Alexander Skarsgard's ridiculously unnecessary character and Kirsten Dunst's classic putdown in the middle of the movie's most tense moment: "Do you know what I think of your plan? I think it's a piece of shit" - "Melancholia" is overtly aware of its own outrageousness. This doesn't necessarily make it a good movie, but it does make it considerably better than the only other ludicrous pretty-looking film of 2011.
And since we had a technical tie (3-3) prior to that last paragraph, this gives us our emphatic tiebreaker. That's right, I just made an addition to a set of criteria I just made up for a comparative analysis on two movies I didn't even really like. I really need "Mad Men" and the NBA back in my life.
The winner: "Melancholia"
Grade: Good-weird level 4
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