Eugene weekly., February 23, 2012, Page 12, Image 12

Di ON s THE qui SE et T
Angst, anxiety & the apocalypse:
THE YEAR IN FILM
B Y M O L LY T E M P L E T O N
“It’s the end of the world. Everyone dies.
It’s rather important, really.”
— B UFFY
THE
V AMPIRE S LAYER ’ S
LIBRARIAN ,
R UPERT G ILES
he end of the world has been depicted
— repeatedly — in movies before. But
2011 wasn’t a time for grand heroics,
for world saving and self-sacrifi ce.
Instead, we got existential angst. Maybe
that sounds a little grim, and sometimes
it was. Dead birds fell from the sky;
young men, overgrown kids, built
fl amethrowers for their violent fantasy
life; a planet appeared, slipping out
from its hiding place behind the sun,
and someone named it Melancholia.
I left Melancholia, the most astonishing of the
year’s apocalyptic visions, with my heart racing
T
12 FEBRUARY 23, 2012
EUGENE WEEKLY
MELANCHOLIA
and my breath a little short. Leave it to Lars von
Trier to nearly bring on a panic attack. He couldn’t
have done it without two superb stars: Charlotte
Gainsbourg, as Claire, offers the capable but
frightened fl ip side — the “normal” life, the husband
and kids, the practicality — to Kirsten Dunst’s self-
destructive, disconnected Justine. Justine cannot get
it together, much to the annoyance of her family,
who are almost willfully oblivious to the depths of
Justine’s depression.
Life on earth is evil, Justine says, as fear sets in
around her; Melancholia may pass by Earth, or it may
hit. Claire takes a different viewpoint: Life is, and it
matters. Life is, until subsumed by Melancholia. Von
Trier’s glorious doomsday fable wraps all kinds of
fears into its elegant, operatic whole — fear for one’s
children, fear of losing oneself, fear of the unknown,
fear of death, fear of everything you can’t control.
Its bleakness is overwhelming and yet somehow, in
all the loss and destruction, there’s a strange peace in
his explosive fi nale.
Where does all this apocalyptic fallout come from?
The easy answers: the economy, the uncertainty, the
deteriorating belief in various American dreams. (The
glib answer: Well, the world’s supposed to end in a few
months, right?) In Take Shelter, an ordinary husband
sees visions of the end, but whether those visions are
prophecy or madness, writer-director Jeff Nichols
leaves in your hands — until he doesn’t, and the fi lm
cracks, a sharp fracture right through the middle of it.
Von Trier’s feminine apocalypse is particularly
welcome as a counterpoint to Bellfl ower, in which
writer-director Evan Glodell stars as Woodrow,
a directionless post-collegiate fellow whose
most productive free time is spent working on a
fl amethrower or tricking out his car so that the heating
system dispenses whiskey (it’s California; who needs
heat?). He and his buddy Aiden (Tyler Dawson)
fi gure that when the world ends, they’ll have the best
weapons. Woodrow’s world ends in a rather different
fashion, in violent upheaval and a rage fantasy so
intense and nightmarish it made me feel physically
ill. But Bellfl ower isn’t glorifying anything; the
fi lm’s super-stylized look, perfect bumbling dialogue
and self-destructive characters combine for a sharp
critique of a hard-to-pin-down kind of aimless young
male rage. Is it self-loathing or a terribly keen eye for
what bubbles behind all that too-cool posturing that
fuels Glodell’s fi lm? Either way, I can’t get it out of
my head, much as I’d like to.
The world almost ends in a London council
estate in the underappreciated Attack the Block,
a scruffy, clever (and raucously fun) fl ick that
dismantles a handful of sci-fi tropes while leaving
the fate of the world — or at least the building — in
the hands of a gaggle of would-be muggers. Even
Kelly Reichardt’s atypical Western, Meek’s Cutoff,
has a fatalistic quality, one made tangible in the dry,
unforgiving Eastern Oregon settings through which
the fi lm’s characters slowly traipse. The Willamette
Valley is so close, but so far, especially when your
guide is unreliable and your party is coming apart
under the strain.
Apocalypse aside, if there was one other trend in
the movies that most moved me last year, it was one
even less expected: family. (Stop rolling your eyes;
WWW.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM • BLOGS.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM