My Year Of Flops Case File # 46 It's All About Love (2003)
Watching Thomas Vinterberg's Dogme 95 breakout hit The Celebration, I experienced a giddy rush of discovery. I was excited about the film, but I was equally excited about decades of Vinterberg masterpieces to come. If he could accomplish so much while adhering to the rigorous set of aesthetic strictures he helped create as one of the architects of the Dogme movement, I could only imagine what he'd be capable of with no restrictions whatsoever.
Then something curious happened. That something was nothing. Vinterberg was inundated with scripts and offers from money people eager to get into the Thomas Vinterberg business, but nothing struck his fancy. Of course, the real trick is to nab geniuses before they make their masterpiece, not after. Get in bed with Michael Cimino after Deer Hunter and you wake up the next morning with Heaven's Gate, a pounding headache, an empty wallet, and an enduring sense of shame.
Vinterberg began to wilt under the pressure. He spent years working on an utterly bizarre screenplay that seemed torn painfully from the innermost recesses of his soul. It was a futuristic sci-fi love story that doubled as a moody, arty meditation on love, loss, and a world that seemed to be spinning madly out of control.
Vinterberg's follow-up to The Celebration, It's All About Love takes place in a near-future troubled by "Cosmic Disturbances" that are alternately whimsically grim and grimly whimsical. The world is rapidly freezing. It snows in July. Tap water turns to ice in seconds during cryptic freeze storms. Ugandans begin magically levitating. People start dying en masse from lack of love, littering the streets with corpses whose hearts simply ceased beating, as much from a dearth of affection as lack of oxygen. Heroin-addled superstar professional figure skater Claire Danes is being cloned excessively and saddled with a shaky Polish accent that makes her sound vaguely vampirish (I kept waiting for her to say "I vant to suck your blahd–in de future!") Arnold Schwarzenegger is elected Governor of California (oh wait, that actually happened).
It must have looked like an unholy mess on the page, but producers no doubt figured that the guy who made The Celebration could transform his script's fuzzy mélange of intriguing but half-baked ideas, lifeless characters, and cryptic social commentary into a satisfying, halfway-cohesive whole. They were wrong.
Vinterberg's Celebration cachet helped attract a formidable cast. Joaquin Phoenix and his soulful eyes of bottomless pain signed on as the lead character, a brooding, lovesick intellectual with a PhD in Polish literature that only sounds like the set-up to a hackneyed joke. Danes plays his estranged wife, a gloomy mega-celebrity with a bad heart (oh, the overwrought metaphors!), insomnia, and a history of drug abuse. Oh and Sean Penn plays Phoenix's brother, a sensitive soul given to loopy, extended pseudo-poetic, pseudo-philosophical monologues about the nature of the world and the importance of human connection. Penn used to be afraid of flying. Then he took medication that worked so well that now he can't do anything but fly. In another movie, that might qualify as a goofy throwaway joke, but here Penn literally spends every scene expounding about the world from planes he mysteriously can't leave.
After an extended break, Phoenix returns to New York to sign divorce papers for Danes, only to be swept up in a web of intrigue and deception. The moody, gloomy enigma of the film's early scenes eventually coalesces into a plot Michael Crichton might have come up with after getting dumped and spending far too much time brooding in the coffee shops of Paris. Danes' family, it seems, has commissioned at least three clones of Danes so that they can replace her once their self-destructive cash cow decides to leave the lucrative world of figure skating behind. But first, they must destroy Danes before she can screw up their plans. Phoenix helps Danes escape east, to a desolate, barren arctic hellhole where popular leisure time activities include freezing and/or dying.
In retrospect, Vinterberg got it backwards. When working with a tiny budget and Dogme guidelines, he'd crafted a movie as entertaining and funny any Hollywood crowd-pleaser. Then while working with big American stars, a healthy budget (10 million dollars), and no restrictions, he made a film as weird and uncommercial as any gritty Dogme provocation.