Thumbs up, thumbs down
Filmmakers can shine in the spotlight or go dark. Lars von Trier? Lights out.
Filmmakers Spike Lee, above, and Lars von Trier elicited different reactions from critic Justin Chang after their Cannes premieres. Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman,” Chang writes, is “furious, beautifully controlled.” Von Trier’s “The House That Jack Built,” meanwhile, “is useless garbage.”
CANNES, France — They really will applaud anything you show at the Cannes Film Festival so long as you put everyone in formal attire and roll out a red carpet beforehand.
I remember thinking this in 2009 at the blacktie gala premiere of Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist,” whose climactic burst of genital-shredding imagery sent horrified moviegoers lunging for the exits. Nonetheless, when it was over, the movie drew a standing ovation and shouts of “Bravo!”
A similar mix of mid-screening walkouts and post-screening applause greeted Von Trier’s “The House That Jack Built,” the hectoring, masturbatory slog of a serial-killer movie that had its out-of-competition premiere at Cannes late Monday night, marking this Danish director’s long-awaited, long-dreaded return to a festival that seven years ago declared him persona non grata.
Von Trier stood there quietly in the Grand Théâtre Lumière when it was over, smiling a thin, inscrutable little smile and basking in his moment of redemption, or perhaps savoring the irony that it had arrived
with the least redemptive anti-entertainment of his career.
I’ll come right to the point, something this endlessly self-amused, throatclearing filmmaker could never be accused of doing: Lars von Trier is a stupid, arrogant troll and, when the mood strikes him, a reasonably talented filmmaker. But there are only a few moments in “The House That Jack Built” in which his stupidity doesn’t entirely overwhelm and negate his talent.
Nearly all of them arrive at the end, when a red-robed serial killer named Jack (Matt Dillon) willfully descends into a fiery, cavernous hell visualized in images of painterly stillness and beauty. (Spoilers? Like Von Trier, I truly couldn’t care less. If reading further spares you buying a ticket, be my guest.)
The eerily Boschian epilogue plays, in some ways, like a reversal of the slo-mo apocalypse that kicked off Von Trier’s uncharacteristically lovely and mature 2011 drama, “Melancholia.” In this case, however, the poetic respite arrives after a 130minute pileup of torturous, tedious violence, nearly all of it directed against women. I’ve never seen Cannes issue screening tickets with a trigger warning before (“scènes violentes”), but festival officials were perhaps wise to make an exception this time.
It was 2011 when Von Trier made some grotesquely illadvised remarks (i.e., claiming to understand Hitler and calling himself a Nazi) at a disastrous press conference following his otherwise rapturously received “Melancholia.” Like most film festivals, Cannes is a champion of artistic freedom in the cinema. But it it is also rooted in French soil, where anti-Semitism — even Von Trier’s bumbling, halfhearted, witless excuse for anti-Semitism — is not taken lightly.
Still, those of us who watched in semi-amusement as the festival kicked the director to the curb knew that he would be back sooner or later, perhaps following some public display of contrition on his and/or the festival’s part. But “The House That Jack Built” finds Von Trier in a singularly unrepentant mood. Presented as the story of a serial killer’s lonely formation, rise and fall, it is better understood as a calculated outrage, a #MeToo think-piece magnet and a 2½-hour trolling session.
The story is structured in five “incidents,” each focusing on one or more of Jack’s victims. Jack clubs a stranded driver (Uma Thurman) to death with her own car jack. He knocks on the door of a woman (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), passing himself off as a cop before garroting and stabbing her … you get the idea. There are also scenes of animal cruelty and human taxidermy, along with some handy corpsefreezing techniques.
All this violence, it scarcely needs to be pointed out, is gratuitously unpleasant. I imagine it might have been even harder to take if Von Trier were a more precise filmmaker, if he had either the will or the discipline to build tension inside the frame, which would require him to do something other than simply wave the camera from side to side like a drunken onlooker.
“The House That Jack Built” is useless garbage, and we should be cautious about mistaking it for much more than that, or elevating it to that plane where, as Von Trier himself has demonstrated in the past, art and trash can converge. Now that he and Cannes have officially kissed and made up, here’s hoping they both can move on to better things.
Spike Lee zings
Doubtless seeking to maximize headlines, the festival saw fit to program Von Trier’s movie right after Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman,” a vastly more successful provocation as well as one of the few high-profile American movies in competition. Lee has been away from Cannes even longer than Von Trier; he competed for the Palme d’Or with 1989’s “Do the Right Thing” and 1991’s “Jungle Fever,” though he has been back with out-ofcompetition titles, including 1999’s “Summer of Sam.”
If “Chi-Raq” (2015) reawakened Lee’s energy and imagination as a satirist, a vital voice on the realities of racialized violence in American society, then his furious, beautifully controlled “BlacKkKlansman” brings him roaring fully back to life. It may not be as conceptually audacious as that earlier picture, but its fusion of incendiary vigor and pulpy, pop-savvy entertainment is something to behold.
“BlacKkKlansman” was adapted from a book by Ron Stallworth, Colorado Springs’ first black police officer, who in the early 1970s succeeded in infiltrating the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. The sheer absurdity of the circumstances clearly inspired Lee and his three cowriters to play the material, ingeniously, for laughs as well as jolts: Moments of suspenseful police-procedural buildup are heightened, rather than undercut, by an edgy comic tension.
Facing discrimination and harassment from white cops not long after he joins the force, Ron (John David Washington, son of Denzel) decides one day to call up the Klan on a whim (their number is listed in the newspaper) and pretend to be an aspiring member. There’s a priceless cutaway to Stallworth’s colleagues, looking on with deadpan befuddlement as this epithet-spouting, Afro-sporting rookie rails on the phone about how much he hates blacks, Jews and anyone else without “pure white Aryan blood” running through their veins.
Some of the funniest, didthis-really-happen moments will come later, when Ron chats on the phone with a young David Duke (Topher Grace), grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who proceeds to set himself up for some of the most humiliating selfowns in recent memory.
The movie comes together when a fellow cop named Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver, excellent) reluctantly agrees to join the undercover investigation, with the real Ron working the phones and Flip playing him in the flesh. It’s an unwieldy arrangement that seems ripe for all manner of dangerous slip-ups, and Lee stages Flip’s meetings with “the organization,” as the KKK prefers to call itself, with a kicky, unnerving flair.
At one point, the most frighteningly volatile of the Klansmen (the terrific Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen), suspects (correctly) that Flip might be Jewish and tells him to drop his pants and show if he’s “circumstanced.” The redneckbaiting humor doesn’t get much subtler than that, especially in the case of a Klansman, played by “I, Tonya’s” Paul Walter Hauser, who isn’t quite as funny as the movie thinks he is.
Lee, of course, has famously never been one for subtlety, and many would conclude that these are not times that call for it. The director uses Ron’s conflicted double identity to give the movie a dialectical structure, at one point juxtaposing a Klan initiation ceremony, replete with hoods and robes, with a somber meeting of Colorado College’s Black Student Union, whose outspoken president, Patrice (Laura Harrier), becomes Ron’s love interest and unwitting informant.
If “BlacKkKlansman” is not above turning its characters into mouthpieces for its ideas, it wards off excessive didacticism by giving those ideas a heady flow and a sustained pulse. There’s real, expressive joy in its anger.
Whatever laughter the movie musters dies in your throat as it builds to a crescendo of horrific images from summer’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., forging parallels between white-supremacist activities now and then, which are no less infuriating for being fairly obvious. The real Duke pops up in news footage, as does President Trump, drawing his now-notorious false equivalency between the protesters “on both sides.”
“BlacKkKlansman” immediately stirred Palme d’Or talk after its premiere, and its Focus Features release is already set to open Aug. 10, nearly a year after the Charlottesville protests. Its warm embrace so far is an auspicious sign for what will almost certainly be a more divided theatrical reception, and for good reason. Lars von Trier may have disgraced Cannes with his cinematic killing spree, but it took a Spike Lee joint to draw real blood.