It starts with a woman being bashed in the face with a tire-jack (get it?!) and ends, literally, in hell. In between those two particular poles of depravity, Lars von Triers The House That Jack Built treats viewers to a litany of violent images: stranglings, shootings, stabbings, beatings, bludgeonings, post-mortem taxidermy, amputated human appendages repurposed as wallets. (Please dont ask, Which appendage? You do not want to know.) The fact that the version hitting theaters now has been toned down were deploying this phrase as loosely as the Danish directors attitudes regarding narrative momentum, or emotional engagement, or affection for his fellow carbon-based life forms from the unrated cut that caused such Cannes-troversy this past spring is a blessing of sorts.
Bjork Label Founder Defends Singer's Lars Von Trier Harassment Claims Barely Legal: 30 Nearly Pornographic Mainstream Films 20 Best Movies of 2018
But as you follow a serial killer named Jack (Matt Dillon, extraordinarily committed to being a creep) throughout his homicidal endeavors, a viewer might wonder if merely trimming five minutes of graphic material was enough. Perhaps they could have removed another banality-of-evil hour or so from this two-and-a-half-hour slog. Or simply cut to the chase and run the Bosch-lite coda right after the opening credits. You wouldnt be missing much. Just the cinematic equivalent of a long, endless smirk.
Framed as a series of incidents that are buffered by voiceover conversations between Jack and Verge (Bruno Ganz), a.k.a. Virgil the tour guide of The Divine Comedy, von Triers mash-up of cerebral exchanges and American carnage shares a lot with its protagonist. Its highly intelligent, more than a touch sociopathic and narcissistic to a fault. Its prone to long-winded rants and fits of rage, when it can be bothered to feel anything at all. Its handsome when seen from certain angles, a fact that it uses to draw unsuspecting folks into its toxic orbit until, boom, sorry, too late for you. Its sloppy at times, purposefully so, as if its trying to be caught. And it has a tendency to compare some might also favor the word mistake murder for art, or maybe art for murder.
That last bit is what truly gets von Trier going: a portrait of an artist as a psychopath. Or rather, a self-portrait, since Jack is in many ways a stand-in for the man clacking the laptop keyboard and standing behind the camera. This killer has a tendency to compose his corpses, some fresh and others frozen, for pictures that he can pore over later; occasionally, he has to do reshoots. Hell issue directions to his players, ranging from sit over here to feed this dead boy some pie. At one point, he ties numerous abductees up in a very specific manner so he can shoot them (like, actually shoot them, but still) and has to keep moving his rifle further back to get the frame in focus. (Gosh, dont his crosshairs look just like a camera viewfinder!) Should we not get the gist, the filmmaker has Dillons character rhapsodizing about the agonies and ecstasies of killing over a montage of von Triers own work. There are two sadists here. One of them happens to be onscreen.
But somewhere between watching Uma Thurman get battered by an obsessive-compulsive, beta-version of Jack and suffering through an alpha version of him mouth M.R.A. platitudes to Riley Keough to be fair, the films misogyny is simply the string section in an orchestra of misanthropy you begin to wonder what von Trier is up to, exactly. Is he trying to point his finger at a complicit audience, a la Michael Hanekes Funny Games? Is he using the horrific extremes of human behavior to point out the dehumanizing structures of society, in the key of Sal? Is he taking the piss out of our love of thrill-kill cult movies and pop entertainment, i.e. The Silence of the Lambs or TVs Hannibal? (The latters baroque death art initially seems a like a target when the director gives us a Gods-eye shot featuring lines of dead crows then he virtually lifts a scene from the TV show for the third act.)
The answer, so far as we can tell, is Maybe all of them or none of them, or possibly Well, [shrugs] if you say so, or probably Go fuck yourself, audience, tee hee. Von Trier has given us a banquet of food for thought here, but in his eyes, its simply all the better for us to gag on. There is no such thing as good or bad art. (Bad taste, sure, but thats something else.) There is definitely ugly art, however, and in the right hands, there can be so much insight to be mined by rubbing ones face in the worst of it. Thats assuredly not the case here. Unlike von Triers best works Breaking the Waves, Dogville, Melancholia, all works wed take a full-metal-jacket bullet from Jack for anything being said here is being drowned out by the actors screams and the creators sniggering. Those films prove hes a great artist. Jack proves hes also capable of making a failed act of provocation. The fact that he ends the movie in hell seems superfluous. Weve already been there for two and a half hours.
No comments:
Post a Comment