Lars von Trier - Dogville (2003)

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Summary: A beautiful fugitive, Grace (Nicole Kidman), arrives in the isolated township of Dogville on the run from gangsters. With some encouragement from Tom (Paul Bettany), the self-appointed town spokesman, the little community agrees to hide her and in return, Grace agrees to work for them. However, when a search sets in, the people of Dogville demand a better deal in exchange for the risk of harboring poor Grace...

Nominally set in an American Town in the Rocky Mountains in the 1930s, DOGVILLE is shot exclusively in studio with a minimum of props.

FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Virtue Is Its Own Punishment

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.
Stephen Holden, NY Times, October 4, 2003