Dogville Release Date: March 26, 2004 Starring: Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany, Lauren Bacall, Patricia Clarkson, Ben Gazzara, Zeljko Ivanek, Chloe Sevigny, Stellan Skarsgård, James Caan, John Hurt, Jeremy Davies Directed by: Lars von Trier GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 3/8/04)
The Danish director Lars von Trier is the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of contemporary cinema. Von Trier/Jekyll is a serious artist who, much of the time, at least, aspires to be Carl Dreyer, his great Dane antecedent whose most celebrated film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, is arguably the most galvanic testament to female martyrdom ever seen on the screen. Von Trier/Hyde, however, is a kind of cinematic P.T. Barnum with intellectual pretensions. Von Trier/Jekyll made the audacious films Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, both inventive, provocative attempts to touch the hem of Dreyer’s garment. Von Trier/Hyde likes to taunt his actors at press conferences and generally make deliberately outrageous statements with no prompting. His production company, Zentropa, has a mural in its office depicting its founder’s head atop the body of Reptilicus (Denmark’s only contribution to the pantheon of rubber movie monsters) and has a porno division. Sometimes Jekyll and Hyde work in tandem, as when von Trier asked an idol of his, Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, to look at his debut feature, Element of Crime, knowing, no doubt, that Tarkovsky would hate it. (Sure enough, he did.) Or when he enlisted some confreres to concoct Dogma 95, a set of ridiculous-seeming moviemaking “rules” that sought to strip the Hollywood artifice from filmmaking, which resulted in only one masterpiece (The Celebration, by Thomas Vinterberg, one of the drafters of Dogma’s “vow of chastity”) but shook up both filmmakers and critics with its sometimes snarky assault on the cinema of contrivance.
A cursory description of von Trier’s new film, Dogville, could well make it seem a Hyde-like proposition. The entire movie is set in the “Colorado” “mountain” “town” of the title, but it’s shot on a giant soundstage. The road, the walls of the houses, their doors and such—none of them are there; they are merely indicated through painted white lines and verbal designations on the black floor of the stage. There are remnants of walls and minimal furniture, and when somebody mimes opening a door, very convincing sound effects are heard. We take most of this in as narrator John Hurt, speaking in a voice of honey-dipped grit, describes the folks of this make-believe town as “good people . . . honest people.” And for the next two and a half hours or so, we see just how good and honest they are. Among others, we meet Tom Edison (Philip Baker Hall) and Tom Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany), the latter of whom wants to write but is at a loss to concoct the “moral illustration” he so longs to bring to the world; shopkeepers-gardeners Ma Ginger (Lauren Bacall) and Gloria (Harriet Andersson); the taciturn apple-grower Chuck (Stellan Skarsgård) and his proper but overtaxed-by-her-kids wife, Vera (Patricia Clarkson); near-nubile Liz Henson (Chloë Sevigny), the locus of young male attention in the town; and more. Into this homely burg stumbles Grace (Nicole Kidman), a woman on the run from mysterious forces, who first pleads with Tom Edison Jr. for shelter and succor, and then presents her case to the whole town. Sure, she can stay—and Grace gratefully volunteers her time and labor to all the townfolk. But every time the police come up the mountain and ask about Grace, the town ratchets up her obligation to it. The rapaciousness and distrust of the townfolk grows incrementally. Von Trier presents Grace’s eventual enslavement—and worse—with the implacability of someone presenting a mathematical proof. And just when you think this is going to be another von Trier tale of female martyrdom, something else happens. Several things, actually: one being the entrance of James Caan as “The Big Man,” who engages Grace in a dialogue that rivals Dostoevsky in its painfully acute analysis of certain theological issues. As for everything else, it’s better for you to see it than for me to describe it.
For those who think that an almost three-hour film shot on a single set has to be the most visually flat thing going, think again. Dogville’s polyglot style does exactly what it’s supposed to, not calling attention to itself but creating a credible screen world. Sometimes the shots are shakily handheld, at other times magic-carpet fluid, and the editing similarly shifts from jagged to smooth; von Trier can do more with one shift of lighting than many directors can do with the whole arsenal of effects offered by Industrial Light & Magic.
The casting is not just inspired on a practical level (in that everyone here gives an uncannily superb performance) but on an iconographic one as well. Merely putting Lauren Bacall, sophisticated siren of Hawks’s To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, in the same frame with Harriet Andersson, the emblem of spiritual and mental corrosion in Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly and Cries and Whispers, is to set off a chain of associations that form another deep layer of subtext in an already awesomely multileveled work.
“But is it anti-American?” That’s the rap it got in Cannes, largely because of some comments von Trier made there, the kind of bait the filmmaker can’t resist dangling before observers who are never going to get him—Jekyll or Hyde—anyway. For Dogville’s end credits, Mr. Hyde comes out to play and throws more chum in the water, offering a montage of disturbing photos depicting real poverty in real America, cheekily scored to a vintage pop hit. Weirdly enough, this cheap shot doesn’t cheapen the film so much as throw another light on it—here is a case where von Trier’s Jekyll and Hyde sides have common cause. And in any case, it would take a true knucklehead not to understand that Dogville isn’t so much Anywhere, U.S.A., as anywhere.
It really is a masterpiece—von Trier’s first, as it happens.
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