Part of The Genius and Misanthropy of Lars von Trier (Dir. #7)

Review by A.A. Dowd: “Anti-American!” hissed the critics at Cannes, their patience tested and their blue blood boiled. “And he hasn’t even been to the States.” It was a strange criticism to lob against such a plainly, rigorously symbolic work. “Dogville,” Lars von Trier’s punishing parable about the rotten, hypocritical soul of a hamlet somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, certainly makes no bones about its contempt for small town American values. We the People, as defined by von Trier, are selfish and petty, cruel and exploitative, enslaved by our prejudices and beholden to our basest instincts. Hardly shocking that the press didn’t go wild for this less than flattering take on the Yankee spirit. More so than just the seething sentiments, what irked folks was that von Trier had never actually set foot on U.S. soil—a point that many critics, Roger Ebert and Richard Corliss included, snuck offhandedly into the parenthetical asides of their scathing reviews. How dare this European dandy, with his pitiful fear of flying, scorn us from afar. And with some of our own acting talent no less! “Say it to our faces,” the petulant peanut gallery all but demanded.

Yet “Dogville,” with its chalk-outline buildings and Brechtian distancing devices, isn’t really about America. It’s about “America”—the lie, the myth, the grand ideals conjured up by such homegrown artistes as Mark Twain and Thorton Wilder. Lars examines not a specific place but the idea of one, the kind that’s been manufactured and sold for decades, and that’s permeated the international consciousness. Don’t come to America and America will still come to you, via its military conquests, its big business enterprises and its small army of “cultural diplomats” (a.k.a. globe-hopping tourists). “Dogville” works, improbably and to deeply disturbing affect, because its techniques and its aims are in perfect sync with one another. It’s pure allegory—didactic perhaps, but pretty well removed from any notions of tangible “reality,” geographic, historic or otherwise. (Until that final slideshow, that is, which artlessly crystallizes the film’s subtext and pulls us out of its allegorical spell. If this is a movie just about the Great Depression, it’s not a very useful one.)

“Manderlay,” von Trier’s ill-conceived sequel and the middle chapter of his proposed Land of Opportunities trilogy, situates itself in a “real” America from the very get-go. Unlike sleepy, cozy little Dogville—surrounded on all sides by darkness, isolated in some unnamed corner of the American Southwest—this titular plantation town has a specific when and where. We know this because instead of beginning the film with an eerie bird’s-eye view of the bare bones set, von Trier roves across a vast map of the United States, trailing a traveling fleet of black sedans. They pull to a stop, and we zoom in on the familiar shape of Alabama, circa 1933. It’s Grace and her mob boss papa in those cars… except that Grace no longer bares the frail, ethereal charms of Nicole Kidman, but rather the soft shape and youthful naiveté of Bryce Dallas Howard. James Caan, too, has been subbed out, his Hollywood gangster archetype now occupied by a smug, weasel-grinned Willem Dafoe.

Having left in their dust the smoldering ruins of Dogville, father, daughter and tommy gun-toting posse take a pit stop in Manderlay, a backwoods settlement still practicing slavery, some 70 years after its abolition. Against her father’s advisement, an outraged Grace frees the slaves and, with the help of a few spare henchmen, embarks on a little experiment in democratic nation building. Fifteen minutes in, and von Trier has already raised the stakes of his anti-American pet project, directing his righteous indignation at an actual historical problem: the lingering social/psychological effects of slavery and the utter failure of Reconstruction. These are complicated issues, ones that require something a little more than the meta-theatre minimalism and ironically inverted Americana of “Dogville.” But there they are again, lazily trotted back out: the blueprint architecture, the black-box ambience, the drolly novelistic narration of John Hurt. The director makes no distinction between the nightmare nowhere of Dogville and the more specific topography of Manderlay, a town stained with the blood of real, remembered history. Allegory just isn’t enough to crack this nut.

Unfolding with a kind of dreadful inevitably, “Dogville” justified its mammoth running time via an incredibly gradual descent into inhuman cruelty. No such terrifying fatalism finds its way into “Manderlay,” which flips the blame and shame onto Grace and then blows two and a half hours slow-cooking her comeuppance. There are few traces of Kidman’s browbeaten heroine in this new Grace, few hints of the physical and emotional torture she bravely endured, or of the avenging angel hellfire she rained down on her old oppressors. That’s partially because Howard doesn’t possess the spooky-good conviction of her predecessor—it takes big chops to make something real out of such a schematically conceived protagonist. But it’s mostly because von Trier has reconfigured his all-purpose whipping girl into an entirely different character. She can bear any burden, this malleable martyr, and this time around it’s that of clueless white guilt.

Grace fumbles through her “little project,” patronizing the former slaves—dutifully portrayed by strong character actors like Danny Glover and Isaach De Bankolé—and forcing the ex-landowners into indentured servitude. (Her name was symbolically apt in “Dogville”; here it’s just a cheaply ironic gag.) When she demands of the latter lot that they don blackface at the dinner table, it’s a “subversive” gesture that’s significance is lost on everyone, including the audience. Of course, it’s really von Trier’s gesture, just one of several faux-gutsy stunts in his scattered, belabored treatise on American race relations. The director seems after a kind of implosion of the Ed Zwick morality tale, recasting the white outsider’s journey as a self-serving (and ultimately rather useless) expression of their liberal guilt. But is “Manderlay” so different from those condescending epics? It’s still Grace, only Grace, the white outsider, who learns anything from the struggles of these besieged black people. And it’s still a white, outsider filmmaker—here rhapsodizing about, yes, a country he’s never visited—who’s filtering black struggles through the live-and-learn trials of one of his privileged own.

“Remember your Tweety?” Dafoe asks of his intrepid brood, drawing a comparison between Manderlay’s newly freed slaves and Grace’s childhood canary, which died when she let it out of its cage. It’s a dimestore metaphor, but von Trier’s notions about the lasting impact of slave mentality and the enduring social divide between white and black America are not as easily dismissed. It’s unfortunate, then, that the twist ending, which flirts with blame-the-victim ethos, compromises this agenda. Anyway, it’s pretty hard to trust a polemic that casts its racist gangster patriarch as the voice of reason. Dafoe’s daddy dearest ends up being right about everything, including his offensive assertion, in the film’s throwaway first line, that all white women want is a fling with a “spear-chucking native.” If von Trier does ever get around to “Wasington,” the proposed third chapter of this art-damaged lecture series, maybe he should bone up on his American cultural studies. Then again, after “Manderlay,” I can’t help but hope it just stays on the backburner.

Last Word: Proof apparent that it’s not just Hollywood hacks that cough out bad sequels, von Trier’s “Dogville” Redux unwisely tackles real history with redundant allegory.

Review By:
A.A. Dowd

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