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Our Town?
In Dogville, it takes a village to raise the devil
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
Danish director Lars von Trier is a snarky smart-ass whose movies have, heretofore, dabbled in misanthropy while maintaining an ironic distance that veered between cruel and unusual. He’s an inventive and fearless filmmaker, which has made the smirkiness of his overheated melodramas a little maddening. He’s directed some arguably good movies—Breaking the Waves, most obviously—and one arguably great TV show, the spooky-kooky Kingdom (now playing in a blanded-out Stephen King adaptation on a network near you). But his cleverness has tended to shortchange his considerable narrative talents—he unravels his own yarns.
Until now. With Dogville, a three-hour allegory about wickedness in the guise of righteousness, von Trier has made his first great film. Audacious on every level, and fully realized by a terrific cast, it belongs to a tradition of moral muckraking that includes The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible—but it’s much more fun than either of those. As cynical as the movie eventually reveals itself to be, it maintains a blackly comic sense of justice.
It says something about both von Trier and our current situation that Dogville split audiences and critics during its rounds of the 2003 festival circuit. Debuting at Cannes not long after the invasion of Iraq, and pointedly introduced by von Trier as the first film in an “American trilogy,” it was taken as an anti-American salvo from a socialist filmmaker. The same week J. Hoberman called it “a masterpiece” in the Village Voice, David Denby dismissed it as “avant-gardism for idiots” and “an attack on America” in The New Yorker.
As much as von Trier probably loves the ruckus, it’s misplaced. Although Dogville is ostensibly set in a tiny Rocky Mountain town during the Depression, the story’s themes are universal.
The story (told in nine chapters, plus a prologue, with arch narration by John Hurt) concerns a young woman, Grace (Nicole Kidman), on the run from mobsters. Winding up in the dead-end former mining town of Dogville, population 15, she is taken in first by the local aspiring novelist and philosopher Tom Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany), and then eventually by the village as a whole. The townspeople (an ensemble that includes Chloe Sevigny, Philip Baker Hall, Ben Gazzara, Stellan Skarsgard, Jeremy Davies and a sharp-eyed Lauren Bacall) are suspicious, yet they respond to Grace’s attempts to win their favor. For a while, homilies about the kindness of strangers are reinforced.
But then police come around with “Wanted” notices offering $5,000 for Grace’s capture, and the good folk of Dogville start to see their visitor as both a potential liability and an ever more exploitable resource. As time goes by, it’s no longer just little chores that she’s expected to perform in exchange for the town’s silence.
Grace’s evolution from big-city fugitive to small-town girl to something much darker is a pretty deterministic character arc, but Kidman juices the role with a beguiling mixture of charm, sincerity and—underneath everything—a fierce instinct for self-preservation. Also notable in a cast of notables is Bettany, who dithers and frets and ineffectually tries to construct acceptable moral frameworks for what he sees happening to Grace and the town.
And then there’s the set. All of the action takes place on one large soundstage with just a handful of props and few doors or facades. The streets of the town and the houses and stores of its residents are marked with big cartoonish chalklines. The stage’s surrounding walls turn black at night and milky white in daytime, suspending the town in unmarked space.
Among the effects of this conceit is that we can often see several characters at once, even though they (because of invisible “walls”) can’t see each other. What’s most surprising is that, for all of the obvious staginess, the movie is forcefully cinematic. The digital video camera zooms around at will, pulling in for intimate close-ups and then jolting skyward for cartographic overhead shots that show the entire town at once. The result is a movie that taps into the expansive freedoms of theater, where a few chairs can convey the weight and personality of an entire house. It gives Dogville a dreamy dislocation that works to its allegorical advantage; it could be—is—anywhere.
I can’t say much about the conclusion without giving away things that make most sense when they’ve had a few hours to build. But its brash, unvarnished logic is almost as hilarious as it is horrifying. Some of von Trier’s unkinder interpreters have taken the ending as some kind of blanket condemnation of human nature. I think it is intended more specifically as a consequence of what comes before. At its core, Dogville makes a humanist argument against any moral system that can justify the exploitation of the weak by the powerful.
And stick around for the credits, which give a final nasty kick.
May 6, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 19
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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