Director of 'Dogville' keeps barking up the same tree
Dogville, Danish director Lars von Trier's theatrical exercise starring Nicole Kidman, is either an airless allegory about opportunistic Americans or another one of the director's parables of female persecution. OK, maybe it's both. But life is too short for three hours of misanthropy and misogyny. Of a piece with the director's Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, his new film also sees a guileless woman as the trembling object of fear and desire. Von Trier is a New Age Victorian, one who gets a sexual thrill from seeing a woman defiled try to maintain her fortitude. To watch this film is to be a sadist's accomplice.
Dogville, Danish director Lars von Trier's theatrical exercise starring Nicole Kidman, is either an airless allegory about opportunistic Americans or another one of the director's parables of female persecution. OK, maybe it's both. But life is too short for three hours of misanthropy and misogyny.
Of a piece with the director's Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, his new film also sees a guileless woman as the trembling object of fear and desire. Von Trier is a New Age Victorian, one who gets a sexual thrill from seeing a woman defiled try to maintain her fortitude. To watch this film is to be a sadist's accomplice.
Though the movie is set in Depression-era Colorado, don't expect snow-dusted peaks and evergreens.
For the fictional hamlet in the Rockies - von Trier's version of Grover's Corners in Thornton Wilder's Our Town - was filmed entirely on an indoor set. Dogville's main street and residences are diagrams on a hermetically sealed big-box floor that resembles a gigantic game board. It's as though von Trier is telling us all that the world's a soundstage and that the players are merely game pieces.
The players are quite good, actually, but they are as wasted as gourmet ingredients in a badly prepared meal.
Kidman is the aptly named Grace, a fugitive in a fur-trimmed topcoat seeking refuge from unidentified pursuers. She encounters the village dreamer, Tom Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany), a would-be writer who calls a town meeting where citizens agree to harbor Grace if she performs menial jobs.
Thus Grace becomes a caregiver to the children of Vera (Patricia Clarkson) and Chuck (Stellan Skarsgard). She assists shopkeepers Ma Ginger (Lauren Bacall) and Gloria (Harriet Andersson). She serves as eyes for the blind Jack McKay (Ben Gazzara). And as another pair of hands for the Hensons (Blair Brown, Bill Raymond and Chloë Sevigny), who make cheap spectacles.
Initially, the self-sufficient townspeople resist Grace's labors, but they slowly come to appreciate her help to the community.
But when the police come looking for her, the citizens turn into an exploitative mob. The film's reliably ironic narrator, John Hurt, makes light of how the townspeople sour on her and hasten the fall of Grace.
As a film, Dogville is stubbornly theatrical, throwing realism down the mine shaft to expose the conventions of feature films as shoddy. As an allegory, it is heavy-handed in its condemnation of Americans who don't accept outsiders but are only too happy to exploit their slave labor.
OK, Lars, we get it! America's a dog-eat-dog place where all the canines are rabid. But this doesn't make you any less of a frothing Great Dane.
Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey
at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.
Dogville
** (out of four stars)
Produced by Vibeke Windelov, written and directed by Lars von Trier, photography by Anthony Dod Mantle, music by Antonio Vivaldi, distributed by Lions Gate Films.
Running time: 2 hours, 58 mins.
Grace. . . Nicole Kidman
Gloria. . . Harriet Andersson
Ma Ginger. . . Lauren Bacall
Tom Edison. . . Paul Bettany
Jack McKay. . . Ben Gazzara
Parent's guide: R (sexual candor, mature themes, sexual violence)
Playing at: Ritz Five and Ritz Sixteen/NJ