A talented director’s revolting turn
Lars von Trier’s latest cry for help, “The House That Jack Built,” is a 2½-hour waste of time about a serial killer going around murdering women. The movie is garbage. It’s worthless. It’s inartistic. It’s revolting. It’s sophomoric. And it is inexpressibly, brain-freezingly, mind-fryingly boring.
Here are two things it’s not. It’s not provocative, and it’s not shocking. Seriously, at this point, if Lars von Trier really wants to shock people, he should make a good movie. That would floor everybody. Smelling salts might be called for.
Yes, the new film bears his artistic signature, we must give him that. But imagine if you worked in an insane asylum for years and arrived one day to find feces smeared on the wall. You might, based on the penmanship and the general atmosphere, be able to recognize the source of the mess. But that wouldn’t make it any better than it is. You’d still know what you’re looking at.
Basically, von Trier is at the stage of his career where the best defense of him would be something like this: “No, he’s not a misogynist! He’s a misanthrope! Better yet, he’s a misanthrope with a sense of humor!” But to believe that, this is what you’d have to call funny: The serial killer cuts off a woman’s breasts and makes a purse out of one of them. That’s hilarious, right? Or subversive? Or taboobreaking?
No, it’s none of those things. It’s pathetic. It’s a once capable director (“Breaking the Waves,” “Dogville”) giving himself over to uninflected, ugly impulse, under some misguided impression that he’s breaking new ground. In fact, he’s expressing himself in the most covered way possible, not digging deep, but picking up hand grenades from the surface of his mind and lobbing them. They’re not even going off.
“The House That Jack Built” is arranged into six parts — five incidents and an epilogue. In most of the incidents, he kills a woman; in one, he kills a mother and children; and in one, multiple people. In all but the first instance, in which the murder is spontaneous, he psychologically tortures his victims, and in voice-over we’re told that this is what makes him an artist.
In between murders, there is more voice-over, as when he speaks about taking photos of the dead victims. “For me, what was really sensational wasn’t the image, but the negative,” he says. “Through the negative, you can see the inner quality of the light, the dark light.” That’s so deep. It’s a misuse of Matt Dillon’s forcefulness and invention to cast him in this way, to have him a play a sadist, who, in one instance, instructs a terrified mother to feed her dead child. “Give George a piece of pie,” Jack says. Then he kills her, too. Poor woman. Poor Matt Dillon.
It’s scene after scene like that, nothing but scenes like that, mostly terrified women, scared children. Cruelty, violation, mutilation. And always, the false cleverness.
There’s no way back. This filmmaker is gone.