Dogville Length

[Solana Axton]

Fourthviewing, last seen just prior to its theatrical release. (Previous two viewings were both at Cannes.) Still among my top five films of this century to date, and perhaps the only one that I was ready to call a masterpiece the second it originally ended. (Loved A Separation even more, but that somehow seemed too "ordinary" for the M-word at first glance.) I reviewed it at considerable length back then, for both Time Out New York and Esquire, so have little to add; 19 years was enough time to erase many details, though, and somehow even watching Vera break the figurines failed to remind me of Grace's specific retaliation. "Wait. There's a woman, with children" inspired almost the same purity of giddy awestruck horror that I'd experienced in the Lumire's balcony 20 years ago next month.

Susan Sontag infamously remarked that the white race was a cancer on humanity. To Lars von Trier, humanity is the cancer. Von Trier's "Dogville" caused a great stir at last year's Cannes Film Festival with charges that the Depression-era fable, set in a rural town in the Colorado Rockies, was anti-American. It is. But anti-Americanism is a small matter when a movie is anti-human.

"Dogville" is as total a misanthropic vision as anything control freak Stanley Kubrick ever turned out. Von Trier, for all his studied technical incompetence, is just as deliberate a filmmaker as Kubrick, but his misanthropy feels both more virulent and more conscious than Kubrick's chilly demonstrations of technical proficiency.

At three hours, and as the first film in a projected trilogy, "Dogville" strains for the epic. This is von Trier's Big Statement (or at least grandiose throat clearing). But in every respect other than sheer length -- in scope, imagination, execution, depth and spirit -- "Dogville" is a piddling movie.

That hasn't stopped it from being widely acclaimed as a masterpiece. Are the critics who are rhapsodizing over "Dogville" actually swallowing its puny, rancid view of humanity or are they afraid that slamming it means they'd be showing themselves not tough enough to take its hard truths? Reading the raves for "Dogville," I've thought of the girl in Michael Ritchie's "Semi-Tough" who announces at an encounter group, "I peed in my pants and it felt good." Except that to get any pleasure out of "Dogville" you'd have to say, "I was peed on and it felt good."

Bullies can be just as persuasive in the arts as they are on the playground and von Trier is nothing if not a consummate bully. An American critic who slams "Dogville" opens him- or herself up to the usual charges of Americans being unwilling to face the ugly truths about their country (no matter how facile or smug or uninformed those "truths" are). But any critic who rejects the film is open to being told they can't accept dark, pessimistic art, that they'd prefer nice movies. That's a very macho vision of the arts, in which the "hissing naysayers" (as one critic called those of us who reject the film -- and let me own up: When I saw it at the New York Film Festival last fall, I hissed) should just go back to our nice humanist movies and leave the heavy lifting to the tough-minded.

But put "Dogville" next to the juice flowing through any great, vital misanthropic art, from Swift to Thackeray to Celine (to W.C. Fields, for that matter), and the thesis dryness of von Trier's work becomes clear. Artists can be just as withering as they like about any milieu, any period, as long as they allow the characters to be fully formed and not just stick figures set up to make their points. "Dogville" is getting talked of as being a raw and demanding experience, but the educated, liberal moviegoers who will constitute its audience won't hear anything they aren't already primed to hear. Von Trier is preaching to the converted here as much as Mel Gibson is in "The Passion of the Christ," and those of us who aren't ready to hear the message are, to von Trier's acolytes, just as much heretics.

As was "Breaking the Waves" and "Dancer in the Dark," "Dogville" is about the degradation and torture of a beautiful young woman. (The critic Greg Tate nailed it in the Village Voice when he referred to the director as "Lars 'The Bitch Killer' von Trier.") In this case, as in "Breaking the Waves," it's specifically sexual torture.

Nicole Kidman plays Grace (cue the distant drums of approaching irony), a fugitive (from what we don't know) who turns up on the outskirts of Dogville. The town's resident young intellectual, Tom Edison (I swear I'm not making that up; he's played by Paul Bettany), has been exhorting the mostly bored townfolk to improve themselves, and in Grace he sees his chance to help both them and her. Tom convinces the residents of Dogville to allow Grace to help them with their chores, in exchange for which she'll be given room and board. Grace's hard work and sweet smile soon make her a welcome addition -- until strangers come to town bearing wanted posters with Grace's face and offering a substantial reward.

From there "Dogville" becomes the longest exercise yet in the Lars von Trier Theatre of Cruelty. When Grace tries to get away, a cement wheel that she has to drag everywhere is attached to a manacle around her neck. Grace is raped repeatedly, and used by the men as the town whore. And the women find ways to inflict their own humiliations. (Three hours allows for a lot of humiliation.)

But where the whipping posts played by Emily Watson in "Breaking the Waves" and Bjork in "Dancer in the Dark" are sacrificial victims, Grace is von Trier's avenging angel. She gets her revenge in the end, and it's so much worse than what's been inflicted on her that whatever sympathy we might have had for her (or, to put it more specifically, for Nicole Kidman's heroic attempt to give a performance in this swill) is rubbed in our face.

It's clear that's what von Trier intends. He wants, I think, to fool us into identifying with Grace, though by the end we're meant to be in the same position as Tom. Our sympathy for Grace mirrors his good intentions. That she turns so villainous is meant to make both good intentions and sympathy seem the province of fools.

If von Trier were simply making the point that the victimized often become victimizers, trite as that is, it would be hard to argue with him. But Grace is fulfilled by becoming the bloodthirsty vengeance demon she turns into in the film's climax -- just as Emily Watson's and Bjork's characters were fulfilled by being murdered and executed. Essentially, von Trier's worldview is no different than that of the most macho pulp writer: In his world, it's kill or be killed. And it doesn't much matter who does the killing and who does the dying because, for von Trier, we are all rotten at the core.

He may find all human beings equally despicable, but that doesn't mean that they suffer equally in his films. Women are von Trier's select victims. That alone doesn't make him a misogynist. What does make him a misogynist is the sadistic relish he takes in the drawn-out destruction of his female characters, which we see as if watching flies having their wings pulled off under a microscope.

Because of the style in which "Dogville" has been shot -- entirely on an indoor soundstage, with chalk outlines on the floor standing in for buildings, and sound effects for things like closing doors -- the actors mime many of their actions. But damned if Nicole Kidman doesn't actually have that concrete weight manacled to her neck. In a von Trier movie, how could it be otherwise?

The director's supporters have tried to explain away the treatment of women in his movies by invoking spiritual or political themes -- "Breaking the Waves" was about the quest for salvation and the sacrifices we make for love; "Dancer in the Dark" was a protest against capital punishment and so forth. But Bjork's execution in "Dancer in the Dark" went on for an obscene amount of time. And long after we've gotten the point in "Dogville," Kidman is still being raped and abused. No matter what point he is allegedly making, we are still watching the protracted depiction of women being raped and killed and otherwise abused.

Speaking about the control he requires of actors in a recent interview, von Trier said, "This is why I work so often with females. To give up control you have to trust somebody, and it's easier for me to convince females to do this, for some reason." He doesn't convince them for long, however. Has anyone noticed that actresses tend to get the hell away from von Trier after working with him? Following "Dancer in the Dark" Bjork announced that it was such a miserable experience she would never act again. And Nicole Kidman (citing scheduling conflicts) has pulled out of the next two films in the projected trilogy.

Given that style, "Dogville" is essentially a filmed stage show -- a bad piece of '30s avant-garde theater, to be specific. But the "open" stage plan serves a metaphoric meaning. That the worst takes place in plain view of everyone else (imaginary walls or no) is meant to implicate all the characters equally in every horrible act. Everyone is guilty (which, of course, means no one is).

Von Trier has borrowed both from Friedrich Durrenmatt's play "The Visit" and from Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." John Hurt narrates the film in a voice as dry as a corn husk, though with just enough vinegar to make it clear that the homiletics his lines consist of are intended as a parody of the narrator in Wilder's play. It's easy to see that von Trier would have contempt for as sweet and loving and achingly poignant a vision of American small-town life as "Our Town." He wants to expose Wilder's vision as a lie.

But von Trier, in whom the dunderheaded and the heavy-handed meet, also misses what's great about his darker source. In "The Visit," a fabulously wealthy woman returns to the impoverished town she left in disgrace years before and offers the townspeople a million dollars to kill the man who wronged her. Durrenmatt's writing is sharp and uncompromised and also very funny. The fabular elements have a pointed playfulness to them. Durrenmatt presents the most appalling things with a fleet absurdity. "The Visit" moves swiftly and surprisingly to its climax. Von Trier grinds away at each instance of cruelty and hypocrisy like someone screwing a cigarette butt into an ashtray long after it's gone dead.

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