In the way he uses a particular movement to promote his own work, in his flair for publicity, and in his relentless hammering away at characteristic themes and techniques, Lars von Trier puts one in mind of Salvador Dali. The Danish filmmaker hasn’t reached the artistic exhaustion the Spanish painter eventually did, nor, on close examination, does he appear likely to. And to American eyes, he doesn’t seem on the political whirligig that left the dandy Dali firmly in the grasp of fascism.
To some eyes, though, he does. I saw Dogville at the Moscow International Film Festival, where one Russian critic (though only one out of many I met) accused von Trier of mindless, ignorant anti-Americanism. When I responded that the filmmaker – who has never been to the U.S. – seemed only to take America as a cinematic metaphor, this sharp-as-a-tack debater responder with a harrumph, "A metaphor with a map."
Is Dogville, which is set in a rural American town during the Depression, some sort of statement about the U.S.? If it is, it’s a terribly sloppy one. Von Trier never establishes just exactly where Dogville, the name of the place, is. And it’s called a "village," a word that’s almost never used colloquially anywhere in America.
The movie does summon up memories of Hollywood films, though, specifically the rural dramas and gangster movies that were a staple of Dogville’s era. This sort of reference jibes with what von Trier did in Dancer in the Dark, which was set in 1964. In that film, Bjork played a Czech immigrant who moves to the United States thinking she’s going to be greeted by a country out of her beloved MGM musicals. But though those movies may have just made it to Czechoslovakia before she emigrated, their era is long ended in the U.S. What greets her is a reality more like an early-60s bit of realism, or even a Cassavetes film.
Whether or not von Trier is playing such an inside game, none of his movies play off a sense of authenticity. The Idiots doesn’t leave a viewer with an intimate view of Copenhagen (whatever intimacy we may share with the cast); Breaking the Waves hardly attempts a complete social portrait of contemporary Scotland.
But… There is a hint of political engagement at the very end – you might say after the end – of Dogville, under the closing credits. Von Trier presents a sequence of photographs that begin with some of the most famous portraits of dispossessed farmers taken by the celebrated Dorothea Lange. The sequence is chronological, with the photos ending with modern portraits, and if they lose the heroic notes that Lange always elicited from their subjects, they do re-emphasize what von Trier would say is the point of the movie: That the poor, despite their reduced material state, have a right and an obligation to high moral responsibility.
This is a longstanding position, popular in the 19th-century among reformers who wanted to get the poor to "stand on their own two feet." In modern days, it has mutated into the blame-the-victim argument of welfare slashers who castigate the poor for bringing their condition on themselves.
Luckily for his own soul (as he himself might say), von Trier’s film makes a far more complex argument than that, one which is rooted in the structure perhaps began in Breaking the Waves, and reappeared in The Idiots, Dancer in the Dark, and now Dogville.
Radically cutting back the clutter of verisimilitude, von Trier has established the village of Dogville on a bare soundstage with virtually no false fronts or structures. Painted lines on the floor mark off walls, doorways and streets, and actors stand within squares marked houses as if they were unseen by all those standing around them. Action outside the village limits is heard, but not seen, since all that exists is the immediate blackness that hides the technical gear and the studio walls.
Von Trier probes this space with his mobile video cameras, all metered so as to work in dim light. As a result, the film always looks like it is taking place in an indirectly-lit underworld, a land of the half-dead, and the lack of "real" housing takes on a secondary meaning. This smeary look is reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s video feature, Il Mistero di Oberwald (1979), which let colors bleed into one another freely, which suggests von Trier is in a video family tree wholly separate from the one sprouting from Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘70s work.
The village’s residents are the usual collection of types – a spinster store owner, a couple with innumerable children, a solitary deaf old man, etc. – and are played by a gallery of stars and familiar character actors, from Lauren Bacall and Harriet Andersson to Ben Gazzara and Philip Baker Hall. No doubt the cast members can be considered a second collection of "types" to go along with the first.
A torpor of poverty hangs over the town, and the only citizen determined to break it is a young man, Tom Edison (Paul Bettany, who gives an unsatisfactory performance though, frankly, it’s only one among many). A self-improvement enthusiast, he holds nightly meetings in the local church trying to buck up the locals and enlist them in a number of self-improvement or charitable projects.
One project drops in their collective lap when, following the sound of gunfire emitting from the valley down below the town, a beautiful woman, Grace (Nicole Kidman, disappointingly bland) runs into town. She’s on the run from a mysterious, though obviously sinister man who shows up soon after in a limousine and, without revealing his face, offers a huge reward if the townsfolk will turn her over. But by this time, under Tom’s leadership, everyone has decided to help Grace out because it’s the right thing to do.
Most of the movie charts Grace’s fall from grace. First welcomed and embraced, she tries to pay back the community by helping out. But soon enough, everybody turns on her, deciding the object of their pity and aid is ungrateful. Tom, the self-regarding secular saint, equivocates, clearly occupying the political space held by the modern liberal between an oppressive, but democratic majority and an exploited, but acquiescent minority.
The political aspect, while irrefutable, is plain more in the telling than in the playing. Seeing it on screen, one experiences Dogville as a typical von Trier spiritual experience. As with the heroine’s in the other three von Trier film’s mentioned, Grace finds herself given over to an intensely cloistered relationship (romantic in Waves, more communal since). The relationship begins by chance, but takes on a serious religious dimension, in that some level of the heroine’s personal salvation becomes entangled with it. But, ultimately, the relationship becomes inadequate, and in a sudden and emotionally violent left turn, the heroine enters a colossally metamorphic moment which somehow achieves the end she desires.
These moments have involved self-abnegation, repentance, and self-sacrifice. In Dogville it involves the temptation of vengeance, a temptation which comes in the person of James Caan. Caan not only gives the movie’s great performance – he wakes it up just as it begins to snooze – but one of his very best. What a great actor; what a tragically wasted career.
Whether or not Grace succumbs to temptation, it’s fascinating that von Trier is able to twin a certain time of morality with the impulse towards fascism. And that’s what brings us back to Dali. The Spaniard liked to toy with religiosity, rather than religion, and he ended up in the devil’s camp. Von Trier isn’t playing, and thus is more careful about where he’s going.
Has he made a good movie? Dogville is provocative now and then, and extremely powerful somewhat less often (though very much so after Caan’s character shows up). You can talk approvingly of von Trier’s "style" because it isn’t really a style at all, but simply and elegantly his way of addressing us.
Viewers, though, have a right to demand that a narrative film be concise. Or at least that, if it sprawls and repeats itself, that all that meandering has some cumulative power. Dogville brings us finally to a brilliant insight, but it brings us by a circuitous, if artistically picturesque route. Unfortunately, in art, direct routes tend to be the most beautiful.