Not So Great Dane
By Josh Larsen

Lars von Trier’s Dogville is a movie so hermetic, so muddled, so ignorantly invective toward the United States that it has done the impossible: turn off even the most politically biased of American movie critics, just the sort of intellectual expatriates who normally lap up silly stunts such as this.

 

Shot entirely on a bare stage with few sets—chalk marks outline rooms and buildings, while actors mime walking through doors—Dogville takes place in a small Rocky Mountain “town” in the 1930s. When a woman (Nicole Kidman) flees there while on the run from gangsters, an idealistic writer (Paul Bettany) takes her in and convinces his neighbors to hide her. Their kindness soon turns toward exploitation, resulting in a half-baked, infantile statement about conformity and capitalism.

 

Tracing the movie’s reception, from its love-it-or-hate-it debut at the 2003 Cannes International Film Festival to its slow release across the United States this spring, has been a study in the limits of critical bias. If you feel that the political bent of reviewers often trumps the offensiveness of bad art, take heart. Dogville is so bad it has knocked off blinders.

 

There have been defenders, though most of them stress the importance of having a provocateur such as von Trier at work rather than any merit to Dogville. I’d agree, to an extent—American movies could use fewer placaters and more troublemakers—yet it’s a sure sign of a director in decline when his mere existence is praised more than his output.

 

More revealing have been the negative reviews, and not just the ones from those who have always hated von Trier. Amidst the boos have been voices you would expect to be offering praise. David Denby of the New Yorker, for instance, called the film “pedantic, obtuse and unwatchable,” as well as “inept avant-gardism.” Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader, who appears to be physically incapable of writing a review without making a negative reference to the Bush administration, admitted that calling “this blend of Brecht and Our Town anti-American may be overrating its ideological coherence.”

 

Perhaps the most thoughtful hit piece from an unlikely source came from David Edelstein, film critic at Slate. Calling von Trier a “preening, misanthropic bully,” he elaborated: “Not that there’s anything wrong with political art, but for all its didacticism and ‘alienation’ effects, the politics of Dogville are on par with a third-rate gangster picture: cheap, opportunistic nihilism, with no enlivening sense of humor.”

 

What shook common sense into these critics? What made them choose art over politics? For the first time that I’ve seen, von Trier took off his mask. His two most notable films to date—1996’s Breaking the Waves and 2000’s Dancer in the Dark—share similarities with Dogville: All three feature a bold, formalistic filmmaking style, suffering female protagonists, and intermittent critiques of the United States (a country von Trier, who is Danish, has never visited). Yet Dogville, with its sterile set and simplistic ideology —not to mention the simpering mannequin Kidman in the lead—reveals the filmmaker for all to see. He’s exactly the bully Edelstein accused him of being.

 

Bullies have many common characteristics, but one trait they don’t usually share is intelligence. With his end-credits sequence, von Trier proves himself a fool as well as an attack dog. To the tune of David Bowie’s “Young Americans,” his screen reveals a series of still photographs of poor, destitute families, most of which seem to have been taken in rural America in the early 1900s. As the credits roll on, von Trier adds pictures of the poor from the contemporary United States. There is no connection to anything in Dogville.

 

I’ve encountered more serious and engaging critiques on the editorial pages of junior-high-school newspapers. What a relief that many of this country’s most influential critics felt the same.