Dogville

MOVIE #1,103 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 08.10.23 RANKING LARS VON TRIER: #8 The genius here is how the minimalist and what is, frankly, at first, a distracting, gimmicky stage setup evaporates, and rather quickly so. This never really feels like the filmed version of a play. It always feels like a movie. And why is that? Because on paper, it really shouldn’t. There are tricks here, naturally: some blatant (the CGI apple truck ride) and some subtle (the masterful lighting). But ultimately, what makes this work is the brilliance of what is a murderer’s row cast, coupled with what might be von Trier’s best writing to date (on a purely literary level). To that second point, this felt more akin to a good book-on-tape then it did theater. John Hurt’s persistent voice as the narrator would have felt overindulgent in a ‘normal’ film. But here it functions as an anchor: a conduit for both individual characters’ internal monologues and broader, thematic ideas.

You have to wait nearly the entire three-hour runtime for it to get into that darkest of the dark LVT nihilism we’ve come to know and love. But when it does, watch out: this is as brutal and as a bleak as anything he’s ever been involved with. He doesn’t have too many good feelings about the human race, and here we find an even more specific disdain for America. And if he didn’t drive it home with that ending, then the closing credits sequence with images of poverty-stricken Americans (from a Jacob Holdt documentary photo book) set to David Bowie’s “Young Americans” bring the devastating hammer down. It’s so fatalistic, that it’s difficult to call it a parable or dissect the themes with any nuance. But I also really appreciate his commitment towards a total repudiation of the species.

If that’s too dark and pessimistic for the average moviegoer, well there’s still over two hours of story featuring significantly lighter subject matter (although, to be fair, Nicole Kidman’s character does get repeatedly raped and ends up in chains, but it’s a slow descent so…).

As mentioned, this is an absolutely bonkers, all-star cast featuring — AMONG OTHERS — Lauren Bacall, Chloë Sevigny, Stellan Skarsgård, Ben Gazzara, Patricia Clarkson and Philip Baker Hall. But it’s Kidman in the lead as Grace and Paul Bettany as her painfully naive counterpart, Tom Edison Jr., whom really steal the show. This is 'in her prime’ Kidman and she owns the screen with her electric blue eyes like none other. Sometimes actors are so famous that you forget how good they are.

In the end, you’ll probably still find yourself coming back to the fact that the look of this — a single soundstage with minimal props and painted lines delineating the different homes and places within the town of Dogville — is the be-all, end-all. But it’s made amateurish or distracting by whatever limitations you the viewer impose. This is the trick at the heart of a lot of Lars von Trier’s work: he makes us do some heavy lifting, and we’re often not accustomed to it. He destroys the contract of the passive medium and makes you work to get something out of it. It’s never easy, but when it’s done right? There’s nothing more rewarding.

ranking lars von trier cont'd
#9 ↩ • ↪ #7

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⫷ MOVIE #1,102 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,104 ⫸

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Dogville is a 2003 avant-garde drama film written and directed by Lars von Trier, and starring an ensemble cast led by Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall, Paul Bettany, Chloë Sevigny, Stellan Skarsgård, Udo Kier, Ben Gazzara, Patricia Clarkson, Harriet Andersson, and James Caan with John Hurt narrating. It is a parable that uses an extremely minimal, stage-like set to tell the story of Grace Mulligan (Kidman), a woman hiding from mobsters, who arrives in the small mountain town of Dogville, Colorado, and is provided refuge in return for physical labor. It was released on May 19, 2003 .