Dogville: One of us

Lars von Trier drags Nicole Kidman through misanthropic, anti-American

By Jeannette Catsoulis

So often with a Lars von Trier film, the cloud of controversy kicked up by its themes tends to obscure the concerns of the average moviegoer. Is it engaging or a drag? Coherent or incomprehensible? A rhapsodic treat or a hammer to the head? Unfortunately, the answers don't help much; for von Trier's films are all of the above, often within the same scene--magnificent provocations, custom-designed to polarize. Fan or foe, it's impossible to watch his work without suspecting the author of harboring more scorn for those who buy into his outlandish scenarios than for those who don't. Unlike any other filmmaker I can think of, von Trier always makes me feel bad about liking him.

Dogville is his most extreme tease yet, the third film in what I like to call his "Female Martyrs" series. Beginning with Breaking the Waves (1996) and continuing with Dancer in the Dark (2000), the recurring plotline involves a na•ve young woman whose desire to help a loved one makes her the willing victim of unspeakable abuse and degradation, resulting in her death and virtual sainthood. In Dogville, the woman is Grace (a luminous Nicole Kidman), a mysterious, trembling waif in a fur-collared coat who stumbles into the little Depression-era Rocky Mountain town of Dogville claiming to be on the run from gangsters.

Too beautiful to be ignored, Grace is befriended by the town's self-appointed moral philosopher, Thomas Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany), who pleads for Grace's protection at a hastily convened town meeting. In exchange for refuge, Grace offers to help the townspeople with various chores; and though her offer is accepted only reluctantly, it's not long before the good folk have progressed from using her as an unpaid floor-washer and apple-picker to installing her as the town whore. At this point the movie crosses over from melodrama to lunacy as Grace, chained to a millstone, is forced to endure brutal, clandestine visits from almost every man in town. Once again (this time literally) von Trier is gleefully dragging his leading lady through the muck.

But Dogville's silly-sadistic narrative is not the only, or even the most daunting, obstacle for audiences to overcome. Coming in at a hair under three hours, the movie's lack of wizards or CGI-generated spiders would strain modern attention spans even if von Trier had not chosen to dispense with frivolities like real houses, trees and dogs and replace them with chalk outlines. Filmed on a vast, black, Copenhagen soundstage, Dogville never strays from a giant Monopoly board on which the actors mime entering and leaving areas marked "The old mill" and "Ma Ginger's store." We can hear Moses, the dog, barking, but we see only his shape on the sidewalk, as if he were the victim of a crime.

Adding to the weirdness is narrator John Hurt, who comments during each of the film's nine "chapters" in a voice dripping with condescension that's just this side of contempt (a black woman and her crippled daughter are permitted to live in Dogville, he tells us, "to show the inhabitants' broadmindedness"). All of this artificiality--the stilted use of a handheld camera, the play-like structure, the minor adjustments of light and sound that provide our only temporal clues--has the effect of distancing us emotionally from the horrors onscreen (like Dancer in the Dark's song-and-dance numbers, which worked as commentary on the film's action). Von Trier wants us to focus on his ideas, not drown in his characters.

But what, exactly, are those ideas? Most are depressingly obvious: the predictability of human nature and its tendency to exploit the weak; the cruelty and xenophobia at the heart of many small, and supposedly God-fearing, communities. There have been squeals of outrage from those who view the film as a deliberate attack on America, all the more heinous because the travel-phobic director has never been here. Well, so what? If they're suggesting we have no right to criticize a country we've never visited, then this reasoning has yet to impress America's Francophobes, most of whom couldn't find Paris on a map if it were playing "La Marseillaise."

Anti-American or just wildly misanthropic, Dogville is by turns bizarre, passionate, dreary, perverse, irritating--and utterly compelling. It's probably fair to say it wouldn't stand up at all without Kidman, whose vulnerability is so mesmerizing it eclipses every other player in the movie (including stellar turns by Patricia Clarkson, Lauren Bacall and Ben Gazzara). Never has von Trier had a more radiant martyr. Yet I can't quite shake the feeling he's enjoying a huge joke at America's expense. Despite a continuing delight in humiliating his heroines, it isn't women he objects to, it's power; and after 177 minutes of tweaking the most powerful country in the world, he masterfully puts the boot in with a credits sequence that plays David Bowie's "Young Americans" over the real faces of American poverty, from the Great Depression to recent history. Have we ever been given the finger more creatively?

Rich with meaning or a sublime prank, Dogville gets to you. In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, critic David Thomson describes von Trier as "brilliant--in a way that gives that term a bad name." Though observant moviegoers will notice scary similarities between Dogville and that other violent study of extreme persecution, The Passion of the Christ--both directors share a sadomasochistic sensibility, a gift for stunning imagery and the tendency to be, well, a little bit nuts--only von Trier prefers that transformative suffering be experienced solely by women. Yet there is hope: While his last two heroines were dispatched meekly to heaven, Grace's destiny is more self-directed, more profane and a great deal more bloody. In von Trier's cosmology, this is a kind of progress.