Summary:
An examination of Jack, a serial killer, over the course of twelve years in his life.
My Thoughts:
Lars von Trier has made a career out of controversy. His last three films, this, “Nymphomaniac”, and “Antichrist” have all been films that I would consider shock cinema. For the most part, his films have still maintained some semblance of artistic integrity through the messages he’s sends with his work; the films he makes might be shocking, but at least they have a point. As much as I enjoyed “Nymphomaniac”, I’ve never revisited it, and I have to say I don’t really have any want to return to “Antichrist” either. This film was one that I was- I don’t know if looking for ward to is the right phrase- but I was anticipating its release ever since it premiered at Cannes last year and caused a huge fuss. People walked out; like, a lot of people. There were rumors that this was von Trier’s most depraved film yet, and I wondered a) if that was all just hype, and b) if he’d actually said something the serial killer genre hadn’t said before. As the release date drew nearer, I actually wondered if I’d go through with watching it, just because of everything I’d heard, but then my roommates wanted to watch it as well. Resigned to my fate, I sat down to watch “House That Jack Built”, expecting one of the most uncomfortable viewing experiences I ever had to go through…
“You’re way too much of a wimp to murder anyone.”
Alright… well, let me say first that there are some things that are done very well in this film. Matt Dillon (“Crash”) kills it (pun totally intended). He’s absolutely the best I’ve ever seen him, and when the writing is good, he is totally captivating. He eats up the screen like no one else. If anything good came from this film it was seeing just how impressive Dillon could be. I know the guy is an Oscar nominee, but he is absolutely terrifying in certain scenes, and he’s one of the only aspects of this movie that I would say make it worth watching at all. He is phenomenal and that can’t be overstated.
The problem comes with Lars himself. In “Nymphomaniac”, the story is told in flashback form- a nymphomaniac woman recounts her story to a man who just rescued her from a rape in an alley. As the woman talks about episodes of her life, the man counters with random facts about the world (a lot of fishing/ water creature references if I remember right- it’s been a few years since I’ve watched it). The facts the man recounts act as metaphors for what is happening to the woman, and in a way both the facts and the episodes give each other more context in the grand scheme of things. For a while, that back and forth really works wonders for the movie, but then it starts to get arduous towards the end (it’s a five and a half hour movie about a sex addict- its pretty arduous no matter what). This film follows the same kind of pattern: Jack recounts a crime and a faceless speaker named “Mr. Verge” (Bruno Ganz, “Downfall”, “Wings of Desire”) answers (more on that later). For the first three encounters, this works really well. The scenes are incredibly disturbing; well acted, well written, and well directed. Some of the sequences have a darkly humorous tone to them, and it speaks volumes to Jack’s character. Plus, the facts that Mr. Verge recounts, for the most part, make sense with the metaphors von Trier is trying to convey. There are a few scenes that are a bit pretentious: Jack insists that murder can be art, and then he explains why in lengthy exposition that essentially equates to meaningless pseudo-intellectual psycho-babble. For the most part however, I was on board.
Then, about halfway through, von Trier goes off the rails. For about a twenty-minute period, there is a sequence where he only shows pictures of art, stock footage of other artists creating, stock footage of the holocaust… all of this we see while Jack and Verge discuss random philosophy off screen in voiceover narration. Even worse, when von Trier waxes poetic about the importance of art he uses clips from his own films… how self-indulgent, pompous, and full of yourself do you need to be to do something like that? The sequence shatters any tension von Trier had built and brings the film to a screeching halt. It’s here that von Trier begins to loose it as far as storytelling goes.
After that sequence, Jack becomes more erratic and starts killing more people. As Jack does this, he stacks the bodies in a freezer, but it’s incredibly obvious the bodies are just dummies. I think von Trier probably knew the bodies looked pretty unrealistic, and so he did his best to avoid showing them in real detail. Some of the bodies looked so fake that we couldn’t help but laugh; really, it’s that bad. If it were just crappy prosthetics that I was complaining about, I could probably forgive this film, but von Trier continuously goes back to babble on about random topics, never really making any coherent point.
The ending is where this movie really lost me. Spoilers follow- this movie sort of sucked so I’m not going to a spare any details. In the end, Jack builds a house with the bodies of the people he killed in his freezer. It looks just as stupid as you might imagine. But it doesn’t end there- it turns out that Mr. Verge is Virgil; the writer of the Aeneid and Dante’s guide through hell in Dante’s inferno (something I guessed about halfway through the film- my pitbull’s name is Virgil, named so because of his roll in Dante’s Inferno- he’s like my little guide through hell!). Jack dies at the end, and LITERALLY GOES TO HELL. The last fifteen minutes of this film are just Jack and Virgil walking through random hellish rooms, and then it ends where Virgil brings Jack to a broken bridge and instructs him to try to get across. Jack falls into a fiery pit and disappears.
That’s the end.
I don’t know what von Trier was trying to say with this ending, but it didn’t work at all.
Verdict:
This movie was ambitious, sure, but ambition only goes so far. You’ve got to have a point, and I don’t really think there was much of a point to this film in the long run. It was meant to shock, and it does that in certain scenes, but overall this film left me feeling nothing. I felt nothing for Jack because he was a psychopath. I felt nothing for Jack’s victims because von Trier constantly undermined whatever emotional work he put in by spouting his psychological drivel at me. And in the end, I felt as if I had kind of wasted a lot of time. This movie is two and a half hours long, and about an hour and a half of it is worth watching. A few good scenes don’t make a movie, nor, sadly, does an outstanding performance. Dillon was great; it’s too bad von Trier’s pretentiousness got the best of him.
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