Never persuaded that Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier (“Zentropa,” “Breaking the Waves,” “Dancer in the Dark”) has been good for the movies, I was not awaiting his latest monstrosity with keen anticipation. Happily, in a manner of speaking, Mr. von Trier’s “Dogville” lives down to a shabby reputation, accumulating in surges of hearsay since its debut at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.
Undeniably freakish and alienating, “Dogville” is a prolonged, tendentious theater piece for the camera (or a couple of digital cameras in search of adequate vantage points, to judge from the coverage of most scenes). The title location, a treacherous hamlet secluded somewhere in the Rockies during the Great Depression, is confined to a platform on a soundstage.
There are no exteriors or fully constructed sets. Just a floor plan that doubles as the city limits, with a scattered wall or prop (beds, desks, chairs, counters) located in the rectangles designated as homes, shops or other sites. One is asked to imagine the gooseberry bushes, the abandoned mine and whatever vistas might surround Godforsaken Dogville, revealed to be a malicious variation on such idyllic hideaways as Thornton Wilder’s Grover’s Corners in “Our Town” or the vanishing village of Brigadoon.
At bottom, Mr. von Trier is working off polemical-allegorical resentment toward the United States. He makes an overwhelming case for returning the contempt. A fugitive named Grace (Nicole Kidman) turns up the morning after gunfire is heard in the wings. This exquisite woman of mystery stirs instant infatuation in Paul Bettany as a young man called Tom Edison, who tries to endear himself in apologetic, self-congratulatory ways. He steps forward as her lovelorn champion with the sparse residents of Dogville, and they vote to protect Grace at a town meeting.
The sunny prospects begin to fade on July 4, the fifth of 10 episodes, counting the prologue, that constitute Mr. von Trier’s accusatory and would-be humbling scenario. Misled by the friendly reception, Grace is victimized by the spite and lechery that really define Dogville. Their helping hand turns into a mailed fist, reducing her from hired hand to slave and slattern.
Grace’s ordeal is rhetorical. Spectators aren’t quite as lucky. Indulging Mr. von Trier’s fever dream will oblige paying victims to sit still for three hours of claustrophobic misery and pontification, much of it embedded in voice-over narration from an invisible John Hurt. A good deal of the footage is so narration-bound that watching “Dogville” is tantamount to watching a long-playing record revolve on a turntable.
The characters don’t repay the benefit of the doubt; they’re contrived to become pathetic weaklings at best and hateful caricatures as a rule. The plot does some expedient cribbing from Duerrenmatt’s “The Visit” in order to lower the boom on Our Town, or the filmmaker’s sitting target. The obvious payoff: Americans are wolves in sheep’s clothing, primed to victimize anyone who comes to them as a trusting pilgrim.
Only the undercurrents of forlorn poignancy between Miss Kidman and Mr. Bettany threaten to humanize the conception. Given the ugliness of the denouement, you hate yourself for trusting a cutthroat as ignorant as Lars von Trier any further than he can embalm the English language, clearly not a native idiom and unlikely to become an adopted one of any facility.
The merely craven or hateful townsfolk provide an all-star giggle or two: Ben Gazzara as a blind lech, Lauren Bacall as an ill-tempered crone, Jeremy Davies as a simpleton, Patricia Clarkson as a black-hearted mom. Stellan Skargaard plays an apple farmer who not only abuses Grace but also affronts the camera with his wretched naked behind. It’s difficult to decide which is the graver hanging offense, but there is repeated opportunity to curse your fate and the drift of modern dogmatic-didactic cinema at “Dogville.”
1/2 *
TITLE: “Dogville”
RATING: R (Occasional profanity, graphic violence and sexual vulgarity, including allusions to rape and prostitution)
CREDITS: Written and directed by Lars von Trier. Cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle. Production design by Peter Grant and Karl Juliusson. Costume design by Manon Rasmussen
RUNNING TIME: 178 minutes
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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