director/screenwriter
Lars von Trier
producer
Vibeke Windeløv
cinematographer
Anthony Dod Mantle
editor
Molly Marlene Stensgård
cast
Nicole Kidman (Grace)
Harriet Andersson (Gloria)
Lauren Bacall (Ma Ginger)
Paul Bettany (Tom Edison)
Blair Brown (Mrs. Henson)
Patricia Clarkson (Vera)
Jeremy Davies (Bill Henson)
Ben Gazzara (Jack McKay)
Philip Baker Hall (Tom Edison Sr.)
Siobhan Fallon Hogan (Martha)
John Hurt (Narrator)
Zeljko Ivanek (Ben)
Udo Kier (Man in the Coat)
Cleo King (Olivia)
Miles Purinton (Jason)
Bill Raymond (Mr. Henson)
Chloë Sevigny (Liz Henson)
Shauna Shim (June)
Stellan Skarsgård (Chuck)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 177m
u.s.
release: March 26,
2004
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other lars
von trier films
reviewed on this website:
- dancer
in the dark
- manderlay
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But one of these
evenings there'll be explosions in the harbor,
And they'll ask what's that bloody awful din?
And they'll see me as I gaze out of the window,
And they'll say: What's caused that vicious grin?
- "Pirate
Jenny"
Artists ranging from Nina Simone
to Marianne Faithfull have covered the Threepenny Opera
song "Pirate Jenny," and Lars von Trier is the latest.
His new film Dogville, which has sparked controversy and
debate ever since premiering at Cannes last year, takes the Brecht/Weill
ditty as its inspiration, wedding it to the homespun theatrics
of Thornton Wilder. Dogville is, at first, ostentatiously
stagey: The entire film unfolds on a vast soundstage, with chalk
marks denoting the outlines of the streets and delapidated homes
of the town, not to mention benches and gooseberry bushes and
even the town dog Moses. Yet this minimalist, digital-video-shot
film has its own cinematic flash and thunder, and does things
only movies can do.
Told in "nine chapters
and a prologue," Dogville introduces us to the inhabitants
of a near-death mountain town (during the Depression, one assumes),
and a more motley crew would be hard to imagine. The youthful,
philosophical, and rather pompous Tom Edison (Paul Bettany) is
the town's nagging conscience, exhorting them to be "open"
to new ideas. But most of them, including the weary laborer Chuck
(Stellan Skarsgård, in one of his finest performances)
and Tom's own father (Philip Baker Hall), a hypochondriacal doctor,
don't care to hear it. The townspeople -- numbering fifteen in
all -- attend Tom's "meetings" mostly to humor him,
but probably also because, well, what else have they got to do?
Into this close-knit town comes
Grace (Nicole Kidman), pursued by shadowy men with guns. Tom
finds her first, and offers to take her in. She gratefully accepts,
and the town agrees to give her two weeks in Dogville, so that
they can get to know her. Grace spends this time offering her
services doing things that don't necessarily need doing (there's
so little work in Dogville that the townspeople pretty much have
it covered). In time, Grace is accepted. She seems ready to start
her life over in this placid, unchanging locale. But the story
doesn't end there.
Von Trier has said that he
intended Dogville as the first film in a trilogy. But
it could also function as the final film in an unofficial
trilogy that began with his Breaking the Waves (1996)
and continued with Dancer
in the Dark (2000). All three focus on women put to gruelling
tests by larger forces -- fate, society, religion. Nicole Kidman,
who has run hot and cold with me, weighs in here with a performance
of willing subserviance -- to the material and to the director
-- that rivals the work of Emily Watson and Björk in von
Trier's earlier dramas. Everyone in the large ensemble seems
to jump at the opportunity to work with such meaty yet primal
material, from youngsters like Jeremy Davies (as a shy doofus)
and Chloë Sevigny (as his acerbic sister) to Lauren Bacall
(as the stubborn tender of the gooseberry bushes) and Ben Gazzara
(as a blind man too proud to admit his disability). Presiding
over everything is the God's-eye narration, spoken by John Hurt
in nostalgic, dulcet tones.
The town brings Grace to her
knees over the span of three hours of screen time, yet Dogville,
for all its "stage"-set whimsy and its imaginary trees
and houses, never lags. The downward spiral is transfixing, the
apocalyptic finale shocking. At heart, Dogville is a cinematic
novel about hypocrisy, an attack on those who espouse "American
values" without practicing them. The film is not called
Grace; the town rejects grace (the quality and the person)
and the possibility of redemption through hard work. Grace is
running from a past worth running from, and Dogville's resident
moralists prove themselves only too eager to throw her back to
the wolves. In doing so, they become no better than the wolves,
and we are left to judge them worthy of their fate. "Pirate
Jenny" is a fantasy, a song of empowerment sung by a maid,
and it's possible to read the climax of Dogville that
way, too. But I doubt that's the interpretation von Trier had
in mind.
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