The art-house apocalypse: more existential than explosive

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Apocalypse now: Shannon tries to outrun the storm with his daughter in Take Shelter.

It used to be that end-of-the-world movies involved directors like Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich blowing things up real good, while bullet-headed Bruce Willis or wise-cracking Will Smith went into emergency Earth-saving mode. Catastrophe cinema meant kick-ass action, can-do American attitude and a whole lot of special effects.

Recently, art-house directors have been offering some angsty, introspective, decidedly depressed alternatives to the conventional cataclysm genre. Mopey, moody and fatalistic, choreographed to Wagner rather than Aerosmith, these takes on global destruction tap into our deepest fears.

Forget aliens, meteors and the big splashy disasters that threaten Hollywood heroes. The terrors here include a spiralling economy, a fractured culture and our own fragile psyches. The problems in these recent films are so unsettling, so intractable, so devastatingly ordinary that they make the end of the world look like the easy way out.

Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, about the next big influenza epidemic, has an uncomfortable eye for chaos and complexity. The film's villains, in fact, are the people looking for easy answers -- the conspiracy-theorist blogging about Big Pharma, the Homeland Security guy who thinks that terrorists must be behind the breakout. ("Is there any way to weaponize bird flu?" he asks. You don't need to, a scientist points out. Nature has already "weaponized" it.)

Death is scary in Contagion -- even Gwyneth Paltrow looks ghastly as she succumbs to a hacking cough and runaway fever -- but 21st-century life is even scarier. The anxiety in this film is viral: The disease is spread by money, by globalism, by our accelerated, fragmented, transient culture, by the anonymous forms of contemporary social contact.

Soderbergh's camera lingers with clammy intensity on hands touching surfaces in crowded restaurants, hotel bathrooms, airport bars. Even more dangerous than the epidemic is the panic spread by a 24/7 news cycle and Internet misinformation.

Lars Von Trier turns the apocalypse inward with Melancholia, which the Manitoba Film Classification Board lists as "not recommended for children," on account of nudity and something called Adverse Psychology Impact. (This might be the board's clunky way of suggesting you'll want to curl up into a fetal ball after seeing it.)

In a typically Von Trier-ian blend of shaky-cam realism and sheer operatic gorgeousness, three disasters unfold: a wedding party goes absolutely haywire, and a woman named Justine (played by Kirsten Dunst) descends into near catatonic depression. Oh, and a giant planet called Melancholia hurtles toward Earth, threatening to wipe out life as we know it.

Von Trier has stated that Melancholia "is not so much a film about the end of the world as a film about a state of mind." The director, whose own struggles with depression are well known, puts his narcissism to magnificent use here, so that the total extinction of life is, in some essential sense, a minor point compared with the crushing weight of Justine's despair.

The latest art-house day of reckoning, from indie director Jeff Nichols, is Take Shelter. In this intensely unsettling film, a stoic Midwesterner named Curtis (played by Michael Shannon, who looks like a handsome man who's been taken apart and then put back together wrong) starts to have fearsome dreams about the end of the world. These visions invade his everyday life, threatening his blue-collar work, his home and his happy family.

Curtis is worried about the end of the world. We're more worried about him. Obsessed with the coming storm, he's risking his job -- which means he's risking his disabled daughter's much-needed health insurance -- and racking up risky debt to finance a storm shelter in his backyard.

Curtis's horrific nightmares are more than matched by the small, unrelenting financial anxieties of the daytime world. With deepening dread, we sense that the middle class is dying, that the economic and social ladder is slippery, that the fall can be fatal. The world might or might not end in this film, but Curtis's heartbreakingly modest version of the American Dream is clearly doomed.

The film's title, Take Shelter, sounds like a piece of advice for all of us. These are worried times, and they're producing some very worried movies. In the Hollywood disaster flick, the world expires with noise and explosions. In the art-house apocalypse, the world ends not with a bang but a whimper. And somehow that's a lot scarier.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 17, 2011 G5