Lars von Trier's Dogville arrives in theaters today after high-profile, polarizing receptions by critics and audiences alike at this past year's Cannes and New York Film Festivals. Controversy such as this is far from rare, but the Danish director's latest feature does have a perplexing power unlike any film in recent memory which ends up making it a genuine must-see.
With a tone pitched uneasily at the level of both seriousness and irony, Dogville manages to come across as both earth-shatteringly profound and playfully inconsequential--or is it playfully profound and earth-shatteringly inconsequential? After months of reflection and two viewings, I am still not completely sure where I stand. As for the film's story, the bold direction it takes over the course of its three-hour running time can be viewed variously as a morality play, religious parable, political allegory, exposé on human nature, feminist diatribe, thinly veiled anti-American tract--and practical joke. Meaning and incoherence, insight and provocation have a wicked way of coexisting so that masterful and infuriating elements are intimately bound up together as the movie unfolds.
A genteel, detached voice-over (John Hurt) introduces us to the quiet, Depression-era town of Dogville in the Rocky Mountains. This antiquated device along with the nine chapter headings dividing the film and synopsizing the action before it occurs lend a tongue-in-cheek literary feel to the proceedings, recalling the narrator of a Henry Fielding novel (or Kubrick's Barry Lyndon). Even more stylized is von Trier's radical decision to film everything on an immense, bare soundstage. In a minimalist theatrical gesture, chalk outlines demarcate the buildings' layout and props are sparse, but the camerawork remains mobile with frequent jump cuts, the sound design is full and realistic, and the actors give largely naturalistic performances. Von Trier plays off these formal disjunctions and, at several points, abandons austerity for disarmingly painterly images of lush lyricism and soft light.
One night, a beautiful young woman, Grace (Nicole Kidman), comes upon the town seeking a place to hide while on the run from gangsters. A kindhearted local and self-styled intellectual, Tom Edison (Paul Bettany), finds her and, no doubt smitten, decides to make her his cause, advocating on her behalf the next day to have the townspeople take her in. Reluctant at first, they eventually let her stay once she agrees to chip in by doing odd jobs around town.
Slowly earning their trust as she works, she takes turns helping out each resident, which gives the impressive, colorful cast an opportunity to carve out memorable performances. Patricia Clarkson is a high-strung mother whose kids Grace babysits and teaches, Lauren Bacall is a shopkeeper, and Ben Gazzara plays a solitary blind man who won't acknowledge his handicap. The veteran ensemble also includes Stellan Skarsgård, Chloë Sevigny, and Philip Baker Hall. They make the best of their often thinly written and sometimes implausible characters.
As the months pass, Grace further ingratiates herself, becoming a part of the community, but the atmosphere shifts when police pressure makes it riskier to shelter the fugitive. Intensifying the ominous quid pro quo, the fearful townspeople increase Grace's duties. In the film's grindingly cruel logic, it is not long before they are abusing her with relish, until the vicious, wrathful conclusion brought on by the entrance of the gangster godfather (James Caan, channeling his famous role as Sonny Corleone).
Von Trier constructs his narrative in stark terms, letting the schematic scenario play out as a self-consciously iconic story, ambiguous enough to entertain multiple interpretations within its rich network of artistic references. In addition to the distancing effect of the staging, Brecht's influence is central to the film's blunt moralism and underlying mischievous nature. Dogville mixes The Threepenny Opera and its "Pirate Jenny" revenge song with a jaundiced variation on Thorton Wilder's Our Town. As a European's acidic take on American life, the film's obvious touchstone is Kafka's nightmarish, unfinished novel Amerika. More pointedly, J. Hoberman has declared that Dogville might rightfully be considered, alongside work by Hawthorne, Twain, and Dreiser, as part of an American literary tradition of the jeremiad form that layers political and cosmic, metaphysical meanings.
Though arguably universal in its moral considerations of generosity and justice, Dogville forces the issue when it comes to anti-American sentiment. It doles out a corrosive lesson in hypocrisy and exploitation through what it sees as especially American values; in the film's rhetoric, a rousing July 4 rendition of "America the Beautiful" resonates later on with blatant incongruity. The grounds for rejecting Dogville's vision rest on the relative smugness of this strategy and the way the film's plot can be seen as devolving into a hollow brand of programmatic misanthropy.
It is fitting, then, that the final credits should epitomize the film's dichotomous attitude. As we see documentary images of appalling poverty, von Trier blasts David Bowie's cheeky "Young Americans," and somehow it's a potent indictment and a flippant, immature sign-off all at once.