'The Worst Person in the World' isn't actually special
Neon
For a movie about indecision and life being the result of choices and experiences, “The Worst Person in the World” is weirdly inattentive to the details of its relationships. When Julie (Cannes Best Actress winner Renate Reinsve) meets comic book artist Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), she lies about having read his work while vaguely remembering something she saw and found offensive. Even as the couple, which has a 15-year age difference, progresses in their relationship, director/co-writer Joachim Trier never establishes if Julie learns more about Aksel’s work and what she thinks of it or if she doesn’t care or what her perspective is on anything. It’s a character study where almost nothing is developed or understood.
The movie wants to be about a woman in her late 20s/early 30s grazing across multiple careers (from med student to psychology student to photography-focused dropout to bookstore clerk) and people (there are several short relationships before Aksel; meeting Eivind [Herbert Nordrum] while she’s still with Aksel complicates things considerably). What you do and who you do it with matters a lot, and there’s power in the transitions that bring big changes to people’s lives during a majorly emotional period. That’s why it’s a problem that “The Worst Person in the World” seems so disinterested in the intricacies that should indicate whether these pairings have merit or not. When Aksel comments on the special connection he and Julie have because of their communication, we haven’t seen enough of their communication or the way they operate as a couple to know if it’s true. We don’t see perpetually non-committal Julie through the eyes of her admirers either. It’s just a movie in which most of the reasons people say and do things are flimsy at best and non-existent at worst.
That doesn’t mean Trier needs to spoon-feed answers, or that people in relationships always know everything for sure. Of course they don’t. But there are things that they know about each other that reflect who they are and how they function together, and the film exists at such a distance from the characters that it’s all chemistry, no clarity. Seriously, it’s weird; in the same conversation a character says someone will be a good mother and recognizes that she is a quitter when something is challenging. That objectively makes no sense, but the film isn’t making a point here, just talking without thinking. (The same goes for encouraging an estranged father to read his daughter’s essay about oral sex. Ya really think that’s going to help the situation right now?)
Speaking of chemistry: Reinsve’s work with Lie and Nordrum does a lot to compensate for the script’s frustrating refusal to explore what anyone sees in anyone beyond the surface. (Voiceover also proves irritating as it often explains what a character said right before the character says it.) If that were the point of the movie, that people start relationships based on an initial thrill and then just let them peter out until finding a new person to be excited about, that would be one thing. But that’s not what’s going on here.
Rather, Trier aligns the professional and personal in a way that certainly shows a main character who is still learning what she wants but punts where it should give us a sense of her as a person and how that does or doesn’t mesh with her significant other. Reinsve’s performance is wildly acclaimed, but Julie’s often floating blankly through life with seemingly no interior thought at all. Just because she says she wants to feel things and not have to put them into words doesn’t mean it’s not bizarre that she seems so vapidly impulsive, without substance. What is interesting about a person who is all gut, no brain, kind of learning that a total lack of focus and investment is a problem?
Everyone is a work in progress; people change and do things that can be surprising. But we know so little of Julie, have so thin a grasp of who she is or her goals or fears or values or or or. We’re told about her mother and her grandmother’s history in terms of relationships and children, but we have no sense of what Julie knows about this and if it can actually be seen as influential to her glassy-eyed perspective. (Also, she has a bad relationship with her father and dates a much older man. End of insight.) Social media or global challenges don’t play a factor other than Eivind’s girlfriend getting really into climate change and the film’s awareness of how relationships can shift based on the evolving priorities of the people in them. But it’s not like the film has anything new or timely to say about temptation. And it feels like there are conflicts and memories that the story needs but forgot about as long-term relationships unfold between people who hardly know anything about each other, and often have no discernible thoughts about what they do know. That “Worst Person” earned a nomination for Best Original Screenplay is appalling.
The only thing that really sticks is a mid-movie sequence in which Julie freezes time and goes to be with Eivind while Aksel and the rest of the world are frozen. It’s haunting and romantic and crystallizes that feeling of wanting two different things at once. Then “The Worst Person in the World” shields us from a lot of emotional fallout or lingering baggage and just throws off the restraints anyway. Watch “Frances Ha” and “Take This Waltz” instead and see all the same ideas, explored so, so much better.
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