Written and directed by Lars von Trier
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany and James Caan
Classification: 14A
Rating: * * * *
Is Lars von Trier's new film, Dogville: A, a masterpiece? B, a childish anti-American insult? C, as long and grey as a Scandinavian winter? D, the opposite of Godville? E, all of the above?
If nothing else can be said of Dogville, it's a film that is like nothing else.
The latest opus from the Danish provocateur stars Nicole Kidman as Grace, a beautiful young woman who arrives on the run from killers to a dead-end Rocky Mountain town in the 1930s. Over the course of four seasons, she is initially treated well, and then taken for granted, and when the residents realize she is at their mercy, forced to be the town's beast of burden and sex slave.
Followers of von Trier may find this sadistic plot-turn familiar. His previous three films of the Golden Heart trilogy - Breaking the Waves, The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark - have been fables involving innocent, abused women whose improbable melodramatic fates are counterbalanced by the low-down documentary grit of his filmmaking style. With Dogville, he starts a new trilogy called USA, and verisimilitude is reduced to a cobweb of elements - Depression-era costumes, black cars, and a snippet of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the radio.
Shot on a football field-sized theatrical soundstage, the town of Dogville consists of chalk outlines for houses and streets and even a drawing on the ground of the totemic dog, named Moses. The characters walk around this giant Monopoly board and talk in a strangely stiff, English-translated-from-Danish manner. Anthony Dod Mantle's cinematography is too varied and inventive for this to feel like a filmed play.
The world of the film exists, like theatre, in an artificial symbolic space.
Among the cast members, there are a lot of stars: Ben Gazzara as a vain, blind old man, Lauren Bacall as a prickly shopkeeper, Stellan Skarsgard as a sour-minded apple farmer, Chloë Sevigny as a narcissistic young woman, Patricia Clarkson as a child-proud intellectual, Philip Baker Hall as a hypochondriacal doctor, Paul Bettany as the self-appointed conscience of the community. And from the outside, there's James Caan evoking his own movie past by playing a gangland godfather.
The story is divided into a prologue and nine chapters and accompanied by a narration from John Hurt, speaking in a syrupy fairy-tale voice. The film lasts for three hours until its savage finale, evoking an Old Testament God's wrath.
Dogville, which had its premiere at last year's Cannes Film Festival, is a notoriously divisive film, with critics lining up to revile it or praise it. What's even more intriguing is how the individual viewer feels pulled from pole to pole as the film unfolds: You marvel at von Trier's invention and boldness, the tenderness of Kidman's performance, or a gorgeous shot of her face through gauze surrounded by apples. At the same time, you recoil from von Trier's shameless manipulation, his leaden attempts at whimsy and the narrative clumsiness. His unsettling sensibility combines childish nose-thumbing with passionate melodrama: You'd be a fool to buy in without reservation, but perhaps a bigger fool to dismiss him.
Much of the allegory is religious (von Trier is a convert to Catholicism). Dogville, on the site of an exhausted silver mine, is a town that prides itself in its self-sufficiency. This concerns Thomas Edison Jr. (Bettany) and he has some of that innocent idealism of a Frank Capra hero (Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda) who has taken on the task of raising the moral level of the community. Dogville, he decides, is not good at "receiving." Soon after he holds a meeting at the mission hall to discuss the subject, Dogville is put to the test: A beautiful young woman with the inescapably symbolic name of Grace arrives, desperate for help and willing to help out in return.
The religious definition of "grace" (usually contrasted with salvation by good works) is the unmerited beneficence from God, and the town's failure to accept Grace is the failure of a biblical test. There is a conversation near the film's drastic end - between Grace and the gangster in the back of a car - that dances on the head of a theological pin.
Which position is more arrogant: The Old Testament or the New? Wrathful righteous justice or condescending forgiveness? The consequences of Grace's choice are immediate and terrifying. Just listen to the audience at the film cheer for the wrong choice.
But von Trier's allegory is not just about religious morality. It's also about specifically the United States of America, which has drawn the ire of some critics. Todd McCarthy, in his lead review in Variety, wrote: "Through his contrived tale of one mistreated woman, who is devious herself, von Trier indicts as being unfit to inhabit the Earth a country that has surely attracted, and given opportunity to, more people onto its shores than any other in the history of the world."
In an important sense, Dogville is anti-American, but it is in good company, following a tradition of American literature, from Hawthorne to Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald and Hammett to the present. Von Trier's target is not the nation which provided succour and hope to the huddled masses, but a particular strain of American ideology, particularly of the currently ascendant puritan-Republican variety.
The Dogville folk are unmistakably at one with the people who branded Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. Thomas Edison Jr. embodies the American tradition of practical and technological know-how, with an emphasis on moral abstractions (as opposed to ethical and historical awareness).
And Dogville is a microcosm of American insularity, the puritan emphasis on community moral standards, the compulsion to evangelize, and the depiction of evil as an external force to overcome.
If the political-religious allegory remains under wraps for most of the film, it spills out in the closing credits in a juxtaposition of David Bowie's rousing pop song, Young Americans, accompanied by a blistering montage of photographic images, from Dorothea Lange's photographs of dispossessed farmers to contemporary shots of the poor and sick, and the homeless in the world's wealthiest and most powerful country. If the ending feels like a cheap shot, it's still one that hits home.
After watching von Trier's previous film, Dancer in the Dark (featuring Bjork singing My Favorite Things while marching to her death sentence), the Irish Times critic Michael Dwyer, paraphrasing The Sound of Music, asked in exasperation: "How do you solve a problem like von Trier?"
No one wants to credit such a professional brat and irritant with the label of genius, but with Dogville he makes it difficult to avoid: Who but von Trier could make such a film? Who else would dare?
Liam Lacey