Dogville by Lars von Trier

I watched Lars von Trier's film Dogville the other night and was impressed. How was I impressed? The only film I'd seen of his previous to this was Dancer in the Dark, with Bjork. It was really slow developing and it had a romantic view of a factory worker, but there are scenes from it that still come to mind now and then: when Bjork would be overcome with music, pulling together the sounds of the factory to create her own symphony. P.T. Anderson used this motif in Punch-Drunk Love, where it was also very effective. But everyone who had seen DitD knew Anderson was just ripping it off.
So how was I impressed by Dogville?
1) the film is set in a small American town in the Rockies, but the town is only sparsely constructed. Most of the town remains as chalk lines on the floor of a film studio.


2) the genre of the film is a mix of Winnie the Pooh like Narration (I think I can call this a genre) - tons of voice over, which implies that it is an adaptation of a novel, though no novel exists. The voice must be the writer/god. Indeed this confusion is encouraged because the film is anti-realist and mostly told in a "mythical" type mood. Everything is universal. Particulars are erased from the script so that the message can extend as far as possible. This relates to the minimalist stage.
3) the one exception to Dogville's universality is that the film makes a big deal about being a commentary on America. The end credits are all pictures of the down and out from the depression, complemented by more pictures of the down and out from later on - in colour. This is all set to David Bowie's tune "Young Americans".
4) Nicole Kidman plays a character named "Grace" who comes to a small town - dogville - which doesn't want to keep her because there is someone on the look out for her - seems like a gangster. The town comes to love her (Palm Sunday), then comes to hate her (very last supper - even Judas shows up). Then something very interesting happens and we have a scene between "Grace" and her Father (I don't know where the spirit was during this). Then Grace does something that seems a bit odd given her name. She refuses the Atonement. (Kidman gives a great performance, as does Paul Bettany, James Caan and Ben Gazzara)
5) The refusal of the Atonement (I will not tell you the details), seems to be the part that von Trier wants to pin on America. This is the only part of the film that seems bogus. The rest of the film is exceptional, but the use of the Christian mythos for an explicit critique of America (which I am not broadly against, just particularly in this case) seems to limit the effect of the film's penetration of the social problems that humans 'naturally' come by. Not just American humans.
6) Grace thus seems not to be the transcendent grace of Christ, but a specifically American reincarnation. This makes the film explicitly political and twerps the myth (which can still be political).

Go rent this three hour film. You'll enjoy it, but you may have the same problems as I did. I found this review to be quite good.
Drop me a line if you had similar problems with Dogville.

One last moment of praise for von Trier. This film does things with metafiction, the ability for a story to expose the fictional mechanisms of the narrative which pervade it, that I haven't seen rivaled by any other film. The device is so obvious and at the same time it is a stroke of genius. I'm speaking of the minimalist stage carved out with chalk lines and various props. Dogville draws a direct line from Marxist theatre, through the postmodern, and into what ever Dogville is. It doesn't seem postmodern , because it insists on truth. This story isn't about relativity folks.