Not many directors would risk career suicide by mounting an alienating three-hour opus on a barely appointed stage, but the cold and complicated Dogville confirms Lars Von Trier’s (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark) sadistic knack for locating his characters’ soft spots and prodding them for a singular emotional experience.
A wicked near-parody of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” Dogville shows how the force of human nature can corrupt the democratic ideals of a tight-knit, God-fearing community.
In the depths of the Great Depression, self-appointed town philosopher Tom Edison (Paul Bettany) finds himself in an existential funk: How can he teach Dogville’s small-minded residents to truly love and accept each other?
Enter Grace (Nicole Kidman), a statuesque beauty seeking sanctuary from gangsters.
Unafraid to play didactic schoolmaster, young Edison convinces the suspicious townspeople to accept the fugitive as one of their own.
The quality of their mercy is strained almost instantly, as the Dogville residents – played with fierce, idiosyncratic gusto by Lauren Bacall, Chloe Sevigny, Ben Gazzara and Stellan Skarsgard, among others – incrementally exploit Grace’s labor, goodwill and bodily integrity to the point of slavery.
Fear not – despite the film’s increasingly gruesome turns of events, Von Trier takes an arch, abstract approach to the loaded material.
All the action takes place on a desolate soundstage. With chalk outlines for houses and sound effects dubbed in for opening doors, the film looks like a colonial nightmare version of The Sims.
The audience stands at such a cold distance that Grace’s trials seem like pure parable.
For the majority of the film, poor Kidman has no problem putting herself center stage to bear the brunt of ignorance and hatred.
Hollywood’s resident ice queen gets put through the wringer and hits home an intense, if too studied, performance. Somewhere, her agent is neatly checking off the “Indie Cred” section of her résumé.
Dogville stands in the midst of critical crossfire, praised for its brave, Brechtian push toward unmediated truth, yet accused of having an anti-American point of view.
The film, after all, beats the audience over the head in its crystallization of America’s historical contradictions as a xenophobic community of immigrants and a violent nation of good Samaritans.
Von Trier, never satisfied with an easy answer, consciously replicates the very system he seeks to tear down, inviting the viewer to make judgments based solely on the surface of things.
If Dogville is appropriately named for the manner in which its irrational citizens hate and judge and use and destroy (and the manner in which American democracy is just another lie and form of exploitation), then Grace surely is too.
Grace, after all, means forgiveness, clemency – the kind of sacred gift bestowed on even the lowliest sinners.
In Von Trier’s eyes, America deserves grace in all its forms – as both the passive victim and the avenging angel.