It's become fashionable these days to toss the "anti-American" label around. Just about everything from fried potatoes to Al Franken to the grey lady herself, the New York Times, has been branded in some circles as anti-American. It's therefore no surprise to hear that the latest film by Danish director and Dogme 95 pioneer Lars Von Trier has similarly been branded as anti-American, because of its theme of mob mentality (in every sense of the word), set in a mythical town in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.

If Von Trier hates anything, it would seem he hates women, as few directors this side of Jane Campion pile more humiliation on their female characters. In Breaking the Waves, Emily Watson's quadriplegic husband demands that she have sex with men and then tell him about it. In Dancer in the Dark, a film that rendered Bjork so emotionally depleted that she swore she'd never act again, every misfortune short of the seven plagues was rained upon his beleagured female protagonist. By those standards, the fate that the residents of Dogville bestow on Nicole Kidman, as a mysterious young woman named Grace, seems like the Welcome Wagon by comparison.

After escaping from captors unknown, Grace wanders into Dogville, one of those small towns that probably never existed outside of the American theatre. Taken in by a young aspiring writer named (yes really) Thomas Edison (Paul Bettany) who sees her as a vehicle by which his weekly lectures about virtue and nobility can be tested, she must first win over a skeptical population that does not take kindly to outsiders in an odd two-week trial which plays like a kind of perverse reality show. Trust in such a place is fleeting, however, and ultimately the population of Dogville, which one other character from "outside" says is "rotten from the inside out", turns on Grace in a way that's both horrifying, but ultimately unsurprising, given the extreme provinciality of their worldview.

DOGVILLE is going to be endlessly compared to Thornton Wilder's "Our Town", right down to its spartan set, which strips the concept of "tell, don't show" that characterizes Wilder's play even further to the point that each residence along Elm Street (named so even though there has never been an elm tree on Elm Street, as John Hurt's kindly narrator informs us) is marked off by chalk lines on a black floor the size of a football field. This mere suggestion of a set, accentuated by the harsh tones of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle's digital video, takes some getting used to, but oddly enough, it works, and in some shots, such as one of Grace filmed through a tarp while hiding in an apple truck, have an American primitive sort of artistry. John Hurt’s oddly paternalistic narration, as if reading a children’s story, gives both a snarky and a foreboding edge to the proceedings, and the baroque score perfectly offsets the mood.

That the viewer is able to suspend sufficient disbelief to fill in the blanks that the film's spartan setting provides is largely a credit to the film's excellent cast. The allure of Von Trier's films has always escaped me, but he is a director with whom actors seem to want to work, and this particular group holds the entire film together. Kidman is the obvious draw, but here she gives an understated, generous performance that defers to the other cast members, led by Paul Bettany's creepily affable Tom, whom he portrays as a naive John-Boy Walton-type as penned by Bertolt Brecht. Von Trier stalwart Skellan Skjarsgaard is a malevolent, hulking presence, Lauren Bacall is actually creepy as Ma Ginger, owner of the only store in Dogville. Philip Baker Hall is Tom's Judge Hardy-like father, Ben Gazzara gives a highly stylized performance as Jack McKay, a blind man who doesn't want to admit he's blind, and Patricia Clarkson is unrecognizable as the town's resident brood mare in a character rendering that undergoes as chilling a transformation as in her portrayal of Julianne Moore’s best friend in last year's Far from Heaven.

For a director who was a founding member of the Dogme 95 movement and one of the architects of the movement’s “Vow of Chastity”, Von Trier breaks many of his own rules in DOGVILLE, so that the film might as well be called Breaking the Vow. Contrary to the Dogme movement’s credo that shooting must be done on location, DOGVILLE makes more full use of sets and props than any film short of the recent Showtime filming of Paul Newman’s production of Our Town. Von Trier’s use of the harsh tones of digital video over the richer colors of conventional film plays right into the hands of recent debates in the film community about the relative virtues of digital over 35mm film, and vice versa. Only in his use of the handheld camera (which in the early scenes often feels jerky to the point of inducing dizziness) are we reminded that this is the technique of the Danish enfant terrible of eight years ago. Indeed, the end credits even boast a "special effects department." Horrors!

Because of the utter ghastliness of DOGVILLE’s characters, combined with a closing credit sequence that involves Dorothea Lange’s photographs of dispossessed farmers from the Depression through the modern era, displayed with the accompaniment of David Bowie’s song “Young Americans”, the film has, inevitably, been called anti-American. However, the concepts of mob mentality, scapegoating, and fear of the Other are universal. At the same New York Film Festival in which I saw this film, I also saw S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. For what is genocide, after all, but scapegoating and fear run amok? With anyone of East Asian descent being fair game to have the crap beaten out of him -- or be held without trial for an indeterminate period of time by the government -- simply for being an Arabic Muslim (or looking like one); with the vitriol being aimed at France by Americans who know nothing about France beyond Pepe Le Pew; and with the endless war that’s being waged in our name to no apparent purpose, perhaps this sort of gentle tap on the shoulder just might be in order, even if Von Trier, of Danish descent, might not be the optimal messenger.

-- Jill Cozzi

Review text copyright © 2003 Jill Cozzi and Mixed Reviews. All rights reserved. Reproduction of text in whole or in part in any form or in any medium without express written permission of Mixed Reviews or the author is prohibited.

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