WAG THE MOVIE
by Chris Dashiell

Dogville is the latest provocation from the ever-adventurous enfant terrible Lars von Trier. The Danish director's films seem to inspire either love or loathing. I consider him an important artist, and his films have always engaged and challenged me in unfamiliar ways, for which I'm grateful. If you don't take risks, you don't achieve great things. This is a truth that has been forgotten by most filmmakers, who want nothing more than to tread dull, well-worn paths. The greatest risk, of course, is the risk of failure. Dogville, I'm sorry to say, is a failure, but it's not a failure of nerve.

Von Trier has chosen to present a parable of human evil in a starkly theatrical form. The town of Dogville, a tiny hamlet in the Colorado mountain country of the 1930s, is nothing but chalk lines on a studio floor, with imaginary walls and doors, and a few props, pieces of furniture, and other objects representing the sum of the town's material life. We meet Tom Edison, Jr. (Paul Bettany), Dogville's resident philosopher, who challenges the townspeople's complacency with lectures about trust and social commitment. One night, a beautiful stranger named Grace (Nicole Kidman) wanders into Dogville, on the run from a group of gangsters. Tom persuades the town's residents to give Grace shelter, allowing her to be integrated into the life of Dogville by laboring for each of them in turn. But Grace's presence begins to arouse various unruly desires in their previously humdrum lives, and before long, things start to get ugly.

With its brown color scheme and Depression-era scenery and costumes, Dogville looks like a parody of some old WPA theater production. Von Trier shoots the action with hand-held cameras, and the film has the style of rough immediacy that is his trademark. Unfortunately, this method is completely at odds with the abstract theatrical setting. Since we know that the set and the story are "unreal" in the way a play on the stage is unreal, the camera needs to accentuate the unreality, not try to make it seem more "real' with a kind of cinema-verité method. This stylistic flaw would not be important, however, if the writing was strong enough to sustain the theatrical impression. Thornton Wilder's Our Town can get away with an abstract presentation because the writing is full of poetry and stimulating ideas. But Dogville's script was written by von Trier, and he's not up to the task of writing a play, which requires a greater fund of eloquence, since it relies primarily on the ear, than writing a film, which can rely on visual effects to make its point.

Dogville's greatest mistake, which turns out to be fatal, is the use of a voice-over narration by John Hurt to provide dramatic background and fill us in on the thought processes of the characters. Hurt's tone seems archly knowing and supercilious, but the words he is made to speak do not justify the tone. We are told much more than we are shown -- Hurt is called upon to explain even the story's turning points and emotional climaxes, and it all ends up sounding like a bad high school production, high-flown, hollow, and pretentious. If von Trier was unable to present his ideas through dialogue, he shouldn't have attempted a theatrical form.

There are a lot of big names in the cast -- Lauren Bacall, Harriet Andersson, Ben Gazzara, Stellan Skarsgård, Patricia Clarkson, Philip Baker Hall, Jeremy Davies, Chloë Sevigny, and Blair Brown. They all seem awkward and uncomfortable, saddled with depth-less characters and trite or pseudo-profound dialogue. Kidman is the only performer who seems completely absorbed in her part. Her character is sensitive, trusting, and strangely unable to stand up for herself in the face of injustice, and Kidman is quietly, intensely moving in the role. It's mostly due to her efforts that the film doesn't completely sink into oblivion, but offers occasional moments of interest and involvement.

Some reviewers, in knee-jerk fashion, attacked the film as being "anti-American," which remains one of the stupidest phrases in the critical lexicon. I think von Trier is trying to articulate something serious about the moral illusions of people who have enclosed themselves in a narrow mental environment, and in this there is a critique of American culture, while at the same time the charge can be applied to any and all groups who bolster their opinions of themselves with ignorance and prejudice. The trouble is, that the director has not delved deep enough into his subject to present a powerful indictment. A beautiful blonde being persecuted by uneducated bumpkins is not a very precise image for our social predicament. And when the language is not trying to soar on the wings of a clumsy metaphor, it is simply flat and uninspired.

This is the first von Trier film that I wanted to walk out of -- and not from indignation, but boredom. Every time John Hurt's voice came on to tell me how to feel and what to think, I felt patronized, and the film ground to a halt. I cringed as Bettany and the other actors tried to bring life to the material while repeatedly missing the mark. There was just enough of von Trier's creepy emotional tone, and Kidman's brave acting, to make me stay in my seat for close to three hours, from curiosity about what the hell the director was trying to do more than anything else. What he was trying to do, it turns out, was shake us out of our assumptions, just as Bettany's character was supposedly trying to do. But the director had the same success as his character.

The very best part of Dogville, I must say, is the ending -- a series of photographs, many of them depicting the forgotten underclass of American life, shown to the tune of David Bowie's "Young Americans." Things are pretty bad when you have to wait until the ending credits to get something out of a movie. Still, when you dare to try something different, once in a while you'll make a dud. Dogville is a dud. I'm sure von Trier will make good films again.

Considerably more modest, but no less biting, Li Yang's Blind Shaft takes on the corrupting influence of poverty on human relations with a ferocity that is frighteningly matter-of-fact. In northeast China, three miners descend into the dark on their daily shift. While joking around, one of them kills another with a blow to the head. The two remaining miners fake a mine collapse, one of them later complaining to management about the death of his brother. It turns out that they got their victim the job by falsely identifying him as a relative. After the murder, they squeeze management for a payoff in exchange for avoiding an official investigation.

The film portrays life in the hinterland with a gritty, no-nonsense style. Corruption is everywhere. Poverty forces families apart, as men go looking for work in the mines. The two men (Yi Xiang Li and Shuangbao Wang, both chilling in their portrayal of callousness) go to an out-of-the-way town to spend their money on cheap liquor and prostitutes, while searching for another victim. They take in a young man (Baoqiang Wang), naive and trusting, who is looking for work after his father has abandoned the family. Li allows the tension to build inexorably until the brilliant climax, which is ripe with ironies.

It should come as no surprise that the film was banned by the Chinese government. What's remarkable is that Li frames his savage critique of the Chinese capitalist miracle in such laconic terms. Blind Shaft can be taken at face value as a working class suspense drama, but the black humor and documentary-style versimilitude lets the angry satire seep in around the edges. Using non-professional actors on a minimal budget, Li has made one of the most effective political films in recent memory without ever mentioning politics.

©2004 Chris Dashiell
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