PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 01/30/06)

Lars von Trier turns 50 this year. He really ought to grow the hell up. This bad-boy-of-Danish-cinema shtick isn't gonna hold up forever. Still, you've got to give von Trier credit-before he came along, most of the world (fans of Reptilicus notwithstanding) didn't even know there was a post-Carl Dreyer Danish cinema to be a bad boy of. (Or is that "of which to be a bad boy?") And he still knows how to get all manner of right-thinking people ticked off for mostly the wrong reasons.

When he brought this film, the second in his projected "USA: Land of Opportunities" trilogy (projected trilogies are the new black), to the 2005 Cannes film festival, he enlivened a lackluster competition slate with not just his film-which, like its precursor Dogville, is a lugubrious soundstage-bound parable-but with the traveling circus atmosphere surrounding himself and his cast and crew as they were besieged by the international press, who demanded to know What It All Meant and What Von Trier And Company Really Thought, etc. They gave as good as they got, with costar Danny Glover kicking in some near-maniacal pronouncements at the press conference and von Trier snottily, albeit not nonsensically, averring that American cultural hegemony makes him virtually American in any case, so why shouldn't he be able to comment on American society. And even if he was talking nonsensically, that doesn't mean he's not right.

In Manderlay, avenging non-angel Grace of Dogville (here incarnated by Bryce Dallas Howard, replacing Nicole Kidman, who got browbeaten by von Trier when they brought Dogville to Cannes in 2003), driving over these great United States with her gangster dad (Willem Dafoe, replacing Dogville's James Caan, whom I can easily imagine muttering, "Enough with this Danish allegorical bullshit"), discovers an old plantation run by Lauren Bacall (who was in Dogville, albeit in a different role . . . yeesh) wherein slavery is still in place. Grace is suitably indignant, and sets about putting things right, and all manner of social, psychological, and sexual intrigue ensues. As von Trier piles outrage upon outrage, it's not his giggliness that registers-although it's there. It's his sincerity. For all its impishness, this is a terribly earnest movie. Not earnestly anti-American, mind you. Earnestly misanthropic.

One might not agree with his conclusions, but his methods remain compelling. And he does have nerve. I mean, anybody can make a movie that's anti-slavery. But to make a movie that's explicitly anti-democracy-that's something.—Glenn Kenny