New York Times:
It Fakes a
Village: Lars von Trier's America
By A. O. SCOTT
OGVILLE,
the setting for Lars von Trier's new film of the
same name, is a tiny, obscure town in the Colorado
Rockies. The adult population numbers about 15, and
during the Great Depression, when the film takes
place, these people's lives are busy, joyless and
harsh. The hard-bitten folk who inhabited the
Northwestern factory town in
"Dancer in the Dark," Mr. von Trier's previous
foray into Americana, at least had a community
theater, but the most Dogville can offer is some
meetings presided over by a self-styled intellectual
named Tom Edison Jr. (the English actor Paul
Bettany).
Dogville is, in short,
a place where life seems to have been reduced to its
crude minimum. A modern American happening upon
"Dogville," which opens in New York and Los
Angeles on Friday, will quickly become aware of what
has been omitted. "I deliberately took out
religion," Mr. von Trier said in a recent telephone
interview. Also, he might have added, such
quintessential American passions as sports, popular
culture and politics: one of the citizens does own a
radio, but he snaps it off as soon as one of
President Roosevelt's fireside chats comes over the
airwaves. In "Dancer in the Dark" you could glimpse
a framed photograph of President Eisenhower hanging
on the wall, a curious touch in a movie supposedly
set in 1964, but nonetheless a scrambled signal of
some connection between the fictitious characters
and the actual political entity they are supposed to
inhabit. In the 1930's in Dogville, where the brief
appearance of a constable is the only sign of the
existence of the state, there are no pictures of F.
D. R. hanging on the wall.
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Then again, there
aren't any walls. Nor are there any trees or houses
or enclosed physical structures of any kind. There
is nothing, in short, to mark Dogville as a place,
American or otherwise: aside from one or two
skeletal structures, an outcropping or two of
painted styrofoam and a few pieces of furniture,
Dogville is conjured out of chalk outlines and stark
stage effects. The floor plans of the tiny houses
are stenciled on the ground, as are invisible
streets and phantom landmarks like the prized
gooseberry bushes and the nonexistent dog whose
nonetheless audible bark signals the arrival of a
stranger.
What happens to that
stranger — a woman named Grace, played with a
flawless combination of vulnerability and cunning by
Nicole Kidman — constitutes Mr. Von Trier's latest
American tragedy. Young Tom Edison, worried without
any obvious reason that the town is in need of
"moral rearmament," wishes for a test of its
virtues, a real-life "illustration" (one of his
favorite words) of his vague notions of community
and responsibility. Grace, who is fleeing from
big-city gangsters, seems to offer a perfect
opportunity. She is reluctant to impose on the
town's kindness but also utterly helpless. Dogville
rises to the challenge of her presence by opening
its arms in generosity, and then enclosing her in a
pious, self-justifying embrace of indentured
servitude, humiliation and, eventually, sexual
slavery.
It has been frequently
noted that Mr. von Trier, a Dane, has never been to
the United States. It was so frequently noted in
discussions of "Dancer" that he was provoked to
conceive an entire American trilogy, and to pre-empt
objections by noting, in press materials, that the
makers of
"Casablanca" had never been to Morocco. Nor had
Kafka been to the United States while writing
"Amerika." "I must say I'm very fond of this idea
that Kafka didn't go to America," Mr. von Trier
said. "For me it's about America, even though it's
about what he had seen in Europe. Somehow America is
a canvas that you can use. Of course the film is,
like Kafka's book, inspired by my own meeting with
not Americans but mostly Danish people. It could be
a place anywhere."
Tom Edison, who is at
once Mr. von Trier's alter ego and, ultimately, his
villain, might endorse this interpretation. Toward
the end of the movie, after the true, ugly nature of
the town and its people has been revealed, he
conceives a novel — maybe even a trilogy — about the
experiences of a town just like it. "Why not just
call it Dogville?" Grace asks. "No, no," he says,
"it has to be universal. A lot of writers make that
mistake." It is a mistake Mr. von Trier is far too
clever to avoid.
What makes "Dogville"
so fascinating, and so troubling, is the tension
between the universal and the specific. "You mean,
why not just call it Denmark?" Mr. von Trier
responded, mockingly, when asked about his choice.
Because, of course, it couldn't possibly be Denmark.
It's America. The script may have been written in
Danish and then translated into the strange,
mock-literary English the characters speak. The
characters themselves may be played by a motley,
international collection of actors ranging from
Lauren Bacall to Chloë Sevigny to Stellan Skarsgard.
(You can hardly expect a man who once cast Catherine
Deneuve as a factory worker named Kathy to care much
about authenticity.) But the clothes and folkways of
Dogville harken unmistakably back to the land of
John Steinbeck, Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson,
whose observations have been filtered through Mr.
von Trier's equally unmistakable European
sensibility. The movie presents a curious blend of
the alien and the familiar: it is a fantasy of
America, but not an American fantasy.
The sight of actors all
occupying the same barren stage, and the knowledge
that the camera will never leave this spot, induce a
squirming, suffocating sense of claustrophobia,
which may be part of Mr. von Trier's point. In his
pitiless view, everyone lives in a fundamental state
of isolation, but no one is ever alone. The illusion
of intimacy is sustained by the shaky close-ups that
have become hallmarks of his intrusive, unnerving
camera style, but even the most secret moments seem
at the same time to occur in full public view. One
of the film's grimmest scenes, the first of several
rapes, takes place in one of the houses, and the
camera pulls back through the invisible walls to the
streets of the town, where the other Dogvilleans are
going about their desultory business. Their
obliviousness to what is taking place in the
children's bedroom over at Vera and Chuck's house
seems like a malign and active refusal to
acknowledge it, a symbol of the repressive, willed
innocence that is among the town's many sins. The
people of Dogville are proud, hypocritical and never
more dangerous than when they are convinced of the
righteousness of their actions. Grace, as it
happens, may not be much better.
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Who are these people?
What is this place? The formal audacity of
"Dogville" is hard to separate from the provocations
of its story and setting. Mr. von Trier, who has
never seen the United States, nonetheless seems to
suggest that he can see through it — through us. It
is hardly surprising that some Americans have taken
this personally, and responded to this brutal
allegory in a defensive tone. Last spring in Cannes,
where geopolitical tensions between Europe and the
United States hung in the air like a bad smell, Mr.
von Trier courted accusations of anti-Americanism —
which, unlike awards, were numerous. Todd McCarthy,
the chief film critic for Variety, wrote that "the
identification with Dogville and the United States
is total and unambiguous." He concluded that
"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."
Mr. von Trier does his
part to further this reading. The film's violent
denouement is followed by a sudden, gear-grinding
shift from allegory to documentary, as the screen
fills with photographs of destitute and miserable
Americans, starting with Dorothea Lange's dust bowl
families and running through the present. The
pictures, accompanied by David Bowie's jaunty "Young
Americans," seem to taunt us with a reality we would
prefer to ignore, and to scold us for believing,
like those benighted Dogvilleans, in our own
unshakable goodness.
Or something like that.
The coda is so heavy-handed it's hard to take it
seriously at all. "Of course, it's cheating a bit to
put these pictures up, you might say," Mr. von Trier
conceded. "But I can't deny that I am by heart a
socialist, and therefore the American system as I
see it would make a situation like this more
probable, maybe push people more quickly to the
wrong side. My primitive view is that if a system is
partly built on the idea that you are the maker of
your own happiness, then of course poor people are
miserable in the sense that they failed completely.
Whereas in other countries, you might look at that
more as a failure of the society."
To take "Dogville"
primarily as the vehicle for this view, however, is
to make it a much less interesting movie than it is.
You might as well say that "Dancer in the Dark,"
which has a bizarre plot involving blindness — and
which ends very badly, indeed — is a treatise
against privatized health care and capital
punishment, aspects of modern American society most
likely to appall the citizens of Western European
social democracies. Expanding the possible
interpretation of "Dogville" (if not his view of
human nature), Mr. Von Trier offered, "I think the
point to the film is that evil can arise anywhere,
as long as the situation is right." It is the
pervasiveness of that evil — the thoroughness of the
film's pessimism — that may seem most alien of all
to doggedly optimistic American sensibilities.
"Dogville" belongs in
the company of other European dreams about America —
Kafka's "Amerika," of course, but also Bertolt
Brecht's plays set among the gangsters of Chicago
and films like Wim Wenders's
"Paris, Texas" and Michelangelo
Antonioni's
"Zabriskie Point." To call these various
works dreams is to caution against taking them too
literally, and also to suggest that they may be most
interesting for what they reveal about the dreamers.
In spite of being led by James Caan, who once played
Sonny Corleone, the black-hatted thugs who roll into
Dogville have more in common with Brecht's
gangsters, who were Nazis in disguise, than with our
own tradition of sentimental, mama's-boy mobsters
from
"The Public Enemy" to "The Sopranos." And
the citizens of Dogville, for all their exaggerated
frontier folksiness, seem to have been projected
from the anxious unconscious of Europe. They are
rooted to the spot, immobilized by habit and
prejudice, incapable of flight or self-invention,
and the social pathology to which they — and Grace —
fall prey looks more like fascism than like our
homegrown forms of viciousness and intolerance.
"Manderlay," the middle
film in Mr. von Trier's American trilogy, will
tackle a more identifiably American problem — racism
and the legacy of slavery — and it will be
interesting to see what European demons haunt its
spartan stage. It is also interesting to note that,
now that Ms. Kidman has moved on, the part of Grace
will be played by Bryce Howard, a young actress who,
as Mr. von Trier perhaps coyly put it, "turned out
to be the daughter of an American director, Ron
Howard." And while it may be going too far to
suggest a link between Dogville and Mayberry — or,
for that matter, between Dogville and Whoville — Mr.
von Trier's austere art film may be closer to the
mess and ruckus of American popular culture than he
knows, and not only because of his fondness for
populating his allegorical landscapes with movie
stars. Part of being American is participating in an
endless argument about what America means, an
argument to which "Dogville" adds an unignorable, if
curiously accented, voice.
And Dogville may be
closer than we think. Shortly after a recent
screening of the film, I turned on the television
and stumbled on another small town in Colorado,
rendered in a self-consciously minimalist style,
where American piety is subjected to systematic and
brutal deconstruction. Sometimes travel to a strange
place gives you a new perspective on home, and a new
appreciation for it. After Dogville, South Park will
never look quite the same.
New York Times:
FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW:
Virtue Is Its Own Punishment
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
The clearest path
toward understanding Lars von Trier, whose
three-hour quasi-Christian allegory, ''Dogville,''
is certain to divide audiences into passionate
champions and hissing naysayers, is to accept that
he is a ruthless provocateur with a practical
joker's sensibility.
Unlike most serious
filmmakers who demand your trust, Mr. von Trier
solicits it with a supercilious smirk, then mocks
your emotional expectations with a teasing
ambiguity. Alfred Hitchcock, who's also been accused
of sadism, played tricks that tickled. Mr. von Trier
wants his to leave a sting, along with the uneasy
suspicion that he's played you for a fool.
''Dogville,'' which has
the first of two New York Film Festival screenings
tonight, has the outlines of a savage Brechtian
deconstruction of ''Our Town.'' While you watch the
movie, it can seem ridiculously long-winded
(especially near the end, when James Caan appears as
a mobster in a black sedan). But once it's over, its
characters' miserable faces remain etched in your
memory, and its cynical message lingers.
As a contemptuous,
nose-thumbing expression of this Danish director's
misanthropy, the movie is relentlessly true to its
hateful vision, depicting as a lie the ideal of
embracing human community (and especially the cozy,
cookie-baking dream of small-town America). The only
true solidarity to be found in any group, it
proposes, is through vengeful, xenophobic mob
violence.
Because most people
automatically flinch at such misanthropy,
''Dogville,'' which concludes that people are no
better (and probably worse) than dogs, faces a dim
commercial future. Set during the Depression in
Dogville, an imaginary American town, it reworks Mr.
von Trier's favorite parable of human cruelty -- the
persecution and martyrdom of an innocent young woman
-- then subjects it to a transcendentally nasty
twist.
Unlike the director's
earlier variations on the theme, this one doesn't
culminate with a comforting peal of celestial bells
or a song of faith by an angel facing the electric
chair.
Grace (Nicole Kidman),
a beautiful stranger running from mobsters, who
wanders into Dogville and throws herself on the
mercy of the townspeople, doesn't ascend anywhere.
Mr. von Trier pulls the rug out from under her by
suggesting that retaliation is more satisfying than
martyrdom, and asserting that forgiveness is a form
of moral arrogance that deserves to be trampled. For
those who come to care about Grace, the turnaround
is a nasty slap in the face, and the practical
joker's final crow of ''what did you expect?''
The Brechtian gap
between the audience and what unfolds is much wider
in ''Dogville'' than in Mr. von Trier's previous
movies because the new film, shot in digital video,
all but does away with naturalistic trappings. It
takes place on a stage designed as a map, with props
and chalk directions indicating place names like Elm
Street (although we're told that there are no elms
in Dogville). The stage is large enough to
accommodate moving cars.
A favorite camera
device is to peer down from above to observe the
characters (their actions sometimes sped-up) as
scurrying ants. Because of the Depression, the town
is hopelessly bedraggled, and filming the movie (in
bleached-out color) on a stage set has enhanced the
claustrophobic ambience.
That Brechtian distance
is further widened by the flowery delivery of an
unctuous British narrator (John Hurt), who relates
the story in a facetious parody of fairy-tale
language. Like a storybook, the movie is divided
into chapters with explanatory titles.
When Grace arrives in
Dogville, she is befriended by Tom Edison (Paul
Bettany), a young philosopher, know-it-all and
John-Boy Walton type who appoints himself her
protector and pleads her case with the townspeople.
(Eventually, he and Grace fall in love.) To gain
community acceptance, Grace volunteers her labor as
Dogville's unpaid housekeeper, gardener, baby
sitter, and all-purpose farmhand.
But her neighbors' good
will curdles into suspicion and loathing after
schoolchildren spot her being raped in an orchard by
Chuck (Stellan Skarsgard), an apple farmer who
blackmails her into becoming his plaything. Then her
life goes swiftly downhill, and she ends up a
prisoner and unpaid prostitute, all the while
maintaining the vestiges of a misplaced Panglossian
faith in her persecutors' underlying humanity.
Among the actors
portraying the townspeople, who gather for regular
meetings, are Lauren Bacall, Blair Brown, Patricia
Clarkson, Jeremy Davies, Ben Gazzara, Chloë Sevigny
and Philip Baker Hall. They make up an ominously
mean-spirited ensemble, ruled by fear, greed, lust
and envy.
Ms. Kidman's Grace
(sweetly underplayed) is an angel of compassion and
charity who forgives their rudeness and excuses
their sins. Her sin (in their eyes) is to act as if
she's better than other people. And one of the
movie's most unsettling notions is that good people
are resented for their virtue. And because they make
everyone around them feel even worse about
themselves, they need to be taught a lesson.
A lot of fuss has been
made about Mr. von Trier's supposed anti-Americanism.
(He has never visited this country.) It seems to me
that this showy stance is more a provocative
maneuver than a hardened prejudice. As long as the
United States is touted as the promised land whose
streets are paved with gold, its myths are ripe for
puncture. We ought to be able to stand it.
DOGVILLE
Written and directed by Lars von Trier; director of
photography, Anthony Dod Mantle; edited by Molly
Malene Stensgaard; production designer, Peter Grant;
produced by Vibeke Windelov; released by Lions Gate
Films. Running time: 177 minutes. This film is not
rated. Shown tonight at 8:30 P.M. and Sunday at 4:30
P.M. at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, as part of
the 41st New York Film Festival.
WITH: Nicole Kidman (Grace), Harriet Andersson
(Gloria), Lauren Bacall (Ma Ginger), Jean-Marc Barr
(the Man With the Big Hat), Paul Bettany (Tom
Edison), Blair Brown (Mrs. Henson), James Caan (the
Big Man), Patricia Clarkson (Vera), Jeremy Davies
(Bill Henson), Ben Gazzara (Jack McKay), Philip
Baker Hall (Tom Edison Sr.), Siobhan Fallon Hogan
(Martha), John Hurt (Narrator), Zeljko Ivanek (Ben),
Chloë Sevigny (Liz Henson), Udo Kier (the Man in the
Coat) and Stellan Skarsgard (Chuck).
Published: 10 - 04 -
2003 , Late Edition - Final , Section B , Column 4 ,
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