Review of Melancholia (2011)
Seen in 2019.
At her wedding, a bride razes her life. Some days later, she returns to the site of that wedding, spending the end of the world with her sister. A rogue planet named after her mental disorder, “Melancholia”, has appeared from behind the sun.
Allegory. Roger Ebert’s interpretation, that the strange mood at the wedding reception is the result of anxiety about the rogue planet, is incorrect. There is no indication that the planet is discovered before it occludes Antares on the morning after the wedding.
The planet is evidently not perceived to be a threat until some time later. The nature of that threat is not credible. The likelihood that a giant planet would come from behind the sun, interact only with the Earth, and impact the Earth directly, all in the space of a few days, is small enough to be discounted. Details provided in the film further reduce the plausibility of the event.
Let’s assume Melancholia is indeed a rogue planet from outside the solar system, not Nemesis or a hidden counterweight to Earth. Inexplicably, Melancholia apparently has clouds of water vapour as the outermost (lightest) visible layer of its atmosphere. In its early interactions with Earth, it causes intermittent snow and hail in summer and a humanly perceptible loss of atmospheric pressure at the surface. As an internal contradiction, there is no resulting wind and no tidal effects. Such effects would have been obvious in the film’s coastal setting.
According to the character of John, an amateur astronomer, the scientific establishment concludes that the probability of a hit is very low. It is possible that John is lying to protect his family’s feelings, but more likely, von Trier is disparaging science. The film shows a diagram of Melancholia’s “dance of death” with Earth. The diagram turns out to be accurate, yet it fails to apply the established Newtonian physics of a two-body problem. It shows the path of Earth, the lighter body, unaffected by the reverse slingshot action of Melancholia around it. This is a failure of the imagination.
Thousands of hours of work must have gone into the elaborate astrophysical special-effects sequences in the film. Obviously, von Trier cared a great deal about how the cataclysm would look. Obviously the artists who worked with von Trier consulted experts. I do not expect von Trier himself to understand or care about astrophysics, but in the context, not doing so is a sign of contempt.
I can understand why von Trier would want to avoid the staples of apocalyptic cinema, and I can see that the only reason for the plot to be apocalyptic is the allegory about depression: The interior-exterior correspondence of the characters and their environment, both at the sterile golf course and further afield, in space. It is a standard classicist template where a truly impersonal event is taboo.
This classicism may explain the astrologer’s view of “the heavens”. Von Trier’s failure to make the plot credible may thus be deliberate, but a credible basic scenario is neither a cliché of apocalyptic cinema nor a liability. Honestly, it could not have taken much more effort to make a credible film. Only the most reactionary critics disapprove of implicit scientific accuracy as anti-humanistic. Therefore I have to assume von Trier was in part a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect, unable to see his ignorance.
Without credibility, much about the film is still beautiful, funny and even moving, but limited. It is just a bunch of upper-class twits, played by glamorous movie stars, in a picturesque environment, doing very little except cruelly slighting one another and suffering.