The Wonderful, Melancholy Worlds of Kirsten Dunst
From ‘Interview’ to ‘The Beguiled,’ mastering the art of ennui.
“The earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it,” Kirsten Dunst calmly intones as Melancholia’s dark-eyed, dark-hearted heroine Justine in an intimate moment of pre-apocalyptic clarity. “Nobody will miss it.”
When Melancholia premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011, Dunst’s haunting turn as Justine, a bride-to-be whose perfectly coiffed exterior belies a manic-depressive mental state that only seems to ebb once the end of the world is actually upon her, was starkly moving enough to earn the then 29-year-old the festival’s coveted Best Actress award — even in spite of director Lars von Trier’s attempts to burn it all to the ground, so to speak, via some ill-conceived off-the-cuff comments sympathizing with Hitler.
While doing press for the film, Dunst was charmingly if reluctantly open about her own battles with depression and anxiety over the years. At the time the actress, who briefly checked into Utah’s Cirque Lounge rehab facility in 2008, admitted to British Elle that she had “experienced depression, many people have,” and later even told Canada’s Flare magazine “I think most human beings go through some sort of depression in their life — and if they don’t, I think that’s weird.”
But while her stunning stint as one of von Trier’s signature victim-heroines may have been what first sparked Dunst to speak publicly about her own experiences with depression, it was by no means the actress’s first time diving into the depths of mental anguish for a role. Oh no: Dunst has been expertly embodying all things ennui for decades now, beginning with the very role that first put her on the map — vampire alert — and soon culminating in an apex of angst otherwise known as her upcoming directorial debut of Sylvia Plath’s classic feminist depressive manifesto, The Bell Jar. (Because some things are clearly just meant to be.) Let’s take a look at how she got there.
[Ed. note: This list has been updated in June 2017 to include The Beguiled, which reunites the actress with director Sofia Coppola for another great Dunst foray into melancholia.]
Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Sure, Dunst technically made her screen debut as an eight-year-old alongside Woody Allen in New York Stories, but for all intents and purposes it was her now-iconic stint in Interview with the Vampire alongside Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise that truly introduced her to the world. As the angelic-faced, bloodsucking child vampire Claudia, she more than convincingly portrays the bone-deep frustration of a little girl sentenced to live with her adolescence forever. (Seriously: The horror.)
The Virgin Suicides (1999)
In Sophia Coppola’s directorial debut, a dreamy adaptation of the Jeffrey Euginedes novel, The Virgin Suicides, a 17-year-old Dunst achingly embodies suburban teenage isolation as Lux Lisbon. Perhaps the prettiest and certainly the most compellingly broken of the five Lisbon sisters chronicled in the film, Lux’s rebellion in the form of a dreamy overnight dalliance with ’70s poster child Trip Fontaine (a young Josh Hartnett) manages to somehow both set off and dominate a film in which the five title characters all suffer the same sorrowful fate.
Crazy/Beautiful (2001)
Love is meant to conquer all in this familiar story of star-crossed lovers from different sides of the tracks. Cast as the consummate wild child, Dunst’s Nicole is the deliberately reckless daughter of a liberal white congressman, whose self-destructive tendencies crescendo following the suicide of her mother and subsequent remarriage of her father. Carlos, a hardworking Mexican-American student played by Jay Hernandez, is essentially her antithesis, which is not necessarily a bad thing for either of them. Anyone who remembers the dramatic intensity of teenage romance fondly will appreciate its reverent depiction here.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Michel Gondry’s whimsical, bittersweet romantic dramedy focuses on the mind-bending aftermath of Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine’s (Kate Winslet) failed romance. But Dunst’s subplot about lost love and lost memories, in the form of a repressed relationship with another secondary character, is truly one of the film’s most subtly heartbreaking reveals.
Elizabethtown (2005)
World, meet the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: She’s quirky, she’s awkwardly perfect, and she’s adorably up for helping sensitive young men work out whatever inner angst is plaguing them. And she always, always has good taste in music. Dunst became the personification of a newly identified stock character type thanks to her role as Claire in Cameron Crowe’s supposedly light-hearted romp about a shoe designer (Orlando Bloom) seeking redemption at his father’s funeral. Why go to therapy when you can befriend a funny flight attendant?
Marie Antoinette (2006)
For her second film with Sophia Coppola, Dunst does the seemingly impossible: make Marie Antoinette, the patron saint of frivolous royal excess, relatable — sympathetic, even. Introduced as a trembling 14-year-old, Dunst’s Austrian princess is literally stripped bare before being shipped off to the French court to mate with the clueless Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) before an eager audience of courtiers. Her portrayal of the hapless French queen gives a heretofore unseen look at the lonely, in-a-fishbowl lives in which the famous can find themselves trapped, no matter the century.
All Good Things (2010)
Before director Andrew Jarecki blew open the convoluted history of real estate heir Robert Durst with HBO’s documentary series The Jinx, he crafted a fictional version of the still-alleged murderer’s life staring Dunst and a pre-meme Ryan Gosling. Dunst plays Katie McCarthy, inspired by Durst’s real wife, Kathleen, who mysteriously and now infamously disappeared in January, 1982. Dunst gently takes us through the stages of a hopeful young woman in love turned frightened wife, turned missing person case.
Fargo (2015)
Dunst made the move to the small screen for the second season of FXs award-winning miniseries, Fargo, as Peggy Blumquist, a small town beautician with big city dreams who can’t seem to reconcile herself with life in little Luverne, Minnesota. Peggy gets caught between two local crime families after accidentally running over a man outside a diner, and trying to cover up the hit-and-run with the help of her husband Ed, played by a brilliantly blundering Jesse Plemons. Dunst manages to give us a surprisingly honest glimpse at the psyche of a woman who always wanted more than she had and won’t let little things like sanity or morality keep her down.
The Beguiled (2017)
Dunst’s third major collaboration with Coppola has her playing a lonely school teacher, isolated with a few other women and girls at a Virginia boarding school in the midst of the Civil War. The unexpected arrival of a wounded union soldier (played by Colin Farrell), sparks rivalries between the women, and hopes of better things for Dunst’s Miss Edwina. “If you could have anything in the world, what would it be?”, he asks. “To be taken far away from here.”
Originally published at www.tribecashortlist.com on August 31, 2016.
