When the end of the world is an afterthought

MANILA, Philippines - By the time she hikes up her wedding dress and sits down on her boss’s assistant’s penis, the message is loud and clear: Mary Jane Watson has left the building. This happens about a fourth way into Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, a big, brave movie about the end of the world and tangentially, the human condition. Playing the emotionally unstable Justine, Kirsten Dunst launches her comeback in style, picking up a Best Actress win at the Cannes Film Festival, rolling out the red carpet on her own return to the zeitgeist, the cultural conversation.

She’s been there before, of course. We’ve been talking about Kirsten “Kiki” (if you’re tabloid-familiar) Dunst for almost two decades now, since her love-at-first-bite turn in 1994’s Interview with the Vampire opposite Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. She was already luminous at 12. But while a lot of child stars peak early, ensuing bodies of work often mired in TV movies and gross out comedies, she blossomed to become a sort of emblem of a generation, the Winona Ryder of the 2000s.

From Jumanji to The Virgin Suicides to Bring It On to Crazy/Beautiful to Spider-Man to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Marie Antoinette, you’d be hard-pressed to find an actress with a better batting average from 1998 to 2011. If she still enjoys immense goodwill among yuppies of a certain age (20 to 28), it’s because she has quietly churned out one of the generation’s most formidable filmographies. Consider this: Kirsten Dunst has made a zeitgeist-relevant movie for every stage of this generation’s life.

She was the girl playing with fire in Vampire (1994), a girl playing with a board game in Jumanji (1995), and the girl playing against acting heavyweights like Robert De Niro in Wag the Dog (1997). In her teenage years, while most of her peers were playing coy with Freddie Prince Jr., she went for cheeky in clever teen comedies like Dick (1999) and Bring It On (2000). Youth has its dark side, of course, a side she indulged in so gloriously in films like The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Crazy/Beautiful (2001). And of course, most people will remember her as the leading lady in one of the biggest franchises of the time, Mary Jane to Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man (2002-2007). Mixing up special effects with films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Marie Antoinette (2006), she was on her way.

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She mastered something in Spider-Man but few people noticed. “When people talk about her acting work they seldom use the word Spider-Man, but she makes those movies watchable,” Andrew Jarecki said in a New York magazine piece on her from last year. “You could argue Tobey Maguire doesn’t work in that part without her. And he might not have worked in that part with 50 other actresses, until you got to her.”

By the time the last Spider-Man movie tanked and Marie Antoinette garnered boos in France (contrary to its French reception and popular belief, it’s actually a critical success — I mean, of course, the French hate Marie Antoinette), she found herself depressed. In early 2008, she was treated for depression at the Cirque Lodge treatment center in Utah. “If you’re successful at a young age, no matter the profession, there has to come a time when you reevaluate everything, what it means to you,” she would later explain. “Is this what I want to do for the rest of my life?”

Seeing her back on the screen in 2011, three years after she almost quit, Kirsten Dunst is the gift that keeps on giving. Saluting R.E.M. in their last video, playing a sort of Warhol girl stand-in for We All Go Back To Where We Belong and making her rounds in the magazine circuit, she’s a welcome break from the celebutards that pervade our time. She’s an anomaly — a young woman who’s not famous for being famous; a young woman famous for being a talented actress.

And she’s still making important movies. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is a spectacular epic that begins as a good domestic drama and ends as a great end-of-the-world saga. The first half of the movie is the complete collapse and destruction of Justine, played by Dunst, on the event of her wedding. She starts the first part luminous, sharing jokes with her strapping husband-to-be (Alexander Skarsgard), and ends it peeing on a golf course, petulant and swiftly swerving towards insane. She’s mostly crazy, not so much beautiful.

By the second half, when the world itself is soon to be destroyed, she is hostile, haughty, heartbreaking, and in glimpses, actually caring. It’s the role of a lifetime and Dunst more than acquits herself. In 136 minutes, she strikes not one false note. In the middle of the world’s effects-laden destruction, Dunst is her own special effect, the scenery-chewing center of the end of the world.

The cinema in New York I saw it in had a crowd, but it wasn’t the crowd Kirsten Dunst is normally associated with. There were senior citizens on dates, bohemians jotting down notes, businessmen in suits. There were twentysomethings, of course. “God, remember Crazy/Beautiful?” my friend asks me. Well, we’ll always have Kiki.