Black Like Me (‘Manderlay,’ ‘Dogville’)

Once upon a time, in the far-off kingdom of Denmark, there lived a chubby little boy named Lars von Trier who wasn’t allowed to play with any other children.  Perhaps it was a succession of childhood illnesses, real and imagined, that kept him from them; perhaps he was being continuously punished for small bits of around-the-cottage mischief, a purloined cookie or an accidentally-shattered knick-knack.  We can’t be sure of what it was that kept him to himself, but we can be sure of one thing:  He liked it that way.

Each day, all day long, young Lars would sit at the window of his second-story room, his fleshy face pressed up against the chilled pane of glass, and watch as the other children filled their time with coarse shouts and callous taunts and games that seemed, to Lars’ properly removed mind, disgusting and primitive and aggressively physical.  He would watch.  And he would judge.  He would concoct series of scenarios dissecting the social structure of those young ruffians, exposing their leisure-time pursuits for what they really were:  abusive contests of cruel one-upmanship, sadistic battles of wills ultimately won when our hero (someone named Lars von Trier, or some cleverly composed anagram of same, or someone incredibly Lars-like...) stepped in and bravely revealed the hooliganry for what it was... and in doing so both disarmed the gentry, as it were, and revealed himself to be the biggest hooligan of them all, the most pathetically Alpha’d ape around.  His self-aware hero would then turn his metaphorical guns on himself; only he, of course, could take down a monster as dastardly as himself.

(And yes, these stories often featured over-involved run-on sentences.)

Now, I have no way of knowing if any moment of famed Danish director Lars von Trier’s childhood resembled the above, but feel perfectly comfortable composing conjecture:  I’ve seen his movies, after all.  Von Trier, for his part, feels perfectly comfortable sitting across the ocean and making polarizing, judgmental movies about America, though he’s never even been here.

He’s seen our movies, after all.

Manderlay follows Dogville (see below) as the second film in little Lars’ American Trilogy, and it’s about:  Lars von Trier.  That’s not a bad thing, because von Trier is a provocative, talented, self-aware filmmaker.  It will be problematic for many, though, that lily-white Lars has chosen to shroud his most recent bout of self-immolation in the guise of a treatise on racism.

Wait until Spike Lee gets a load of this one.

Like its predecessor, the film takes place in Depression-era rurality, but the location has shifted from Colorado to Alabama.  Heroine Grace (this time played by Villager and Opie-offspring Bryce Howard) stumbles on to a plantation that, almost fifty years after the end of the Civil War, keeps slaves; it seems that George Bush isn’t the only person who doesn’t care about black people.  With the help of her father’s mobsters she takes the place over, and  takes it upon herself to liberate these peoples’ hearts and minds.

Everything goes as planned.  And, of course, nothing at all goes well.

You could – and many will – say the same for the movie itself.  Von Trier is playing with strong stuff here.  He trots out divisive, complex topics with which he is fundamentally incapable of dealing.  The nature of freedom crosses paths with psychological predeterminism while dialogue is littered with the n word and whips are used to punctuate points.  As if racism wasn’t enough of a loaded topic, American imperialism is lampooned as well.

Those used to sucking at the mindless milk of Hollywood’s teat may be shell-shocked into thinking that Manderlay is actually addressing issues by inventing interplay around them, but everything is argued with the effectiveness of a junior high “Hate the Hate!” improv group.  Conflicts are cherry-picked from situations, and characters numbly agree to abide by the film’s inner logic.  There is some tragedy that any thoughts von Trier successfully manages to provoke are easily defeated by his inability to resist endless provocation, and something really sorry about a film that feels no need to apologize for its lack of concern regarding the slaves about which it has concerned itself.

Yes, some tragedy... and a lot of comedy.  And it’s black comedy.  The film almost takes its own failure as a central theme, and revels in its irresponsibilities.  It works, lawd help me, because – well, because I’m not black, for one thing.  I enjoyed the movie more than I had any right to.  I can’t imagine any African-American embracing a movie so actively dismissive about its African-American characters. 

Of course, that’s my problem.  And Grace’s.  And Lars von Trier’s.  And we, not the slaves, are the butt of the movie’s jokes.

Manderlay, even more than Dogville, attacks Good Intentions.  It’s alabaster-skinned Grace’s ivory-tower idealism that gets her in trouble; whether she’s dictatorially shoving democracy down the throats of those who aren’t sure they want it or excusing a bout of jungle fever as some noble attempt at interracial romance, her actions belie her words.  She’s as arrogant as all of Dogville, dooming others through her self-importance.

As does von Trier.  The important thing to remember about Manderlay is that it is absolutely unreal on every level.  It does not take place on a plantation, or anywhere in “Alabama”, or in the United States.  The cast and crew have assembled in vonTrierville, a harsh, barren land where their fates are one man’s folly. 

From top to bottom, the movie is designed to emphasize its unreality.

Like Dogville, Manderlay utilizes a non-set setting – filmed on an empty soundstage, actors pantomime their way through buildings and rooms that are nothing more than by chalk outlines– that denies any real sense of time or place.  While the previous film used this Our Town Goes to Hell atmosphere creatively (and at times illustratively), here it serves little purpose but to emphasize that everything isn’t properly taking place anywhere other than von Trier’s little head.  The director may as well end each episode of the trilogy by zooming out to a shot of himself staring into a little glass snowglobe.

Without a setting to ground ourselves in, we must find allegiance with the actors... but can we?  Von Trier has been openly prideful about his disdain for his cattle, and he again works to actively degrade them, here.  Whether by choice or no, the central character was recast – Howard is younger than Nicole Kidman’s Grace, and her naïveté works both as a plot element and to make her putty under the director’s heel.  As is his wont, von Trier is relentlessly cruel to her, subjecting her to a needlessly explicit sex scene... and a ridiculous monologue about some lost pet bird named “Tweety.”

A bunch of faces – Lauren Hutton, Jeremy Davies, Zeljko Ivanek – return here in completely different roles; this serves not only to underline the theatricality of the piece, but to undermine the performers’ work:  Oh, they’re just pretending, and this time Chloë Sevigny is Landowner #5 instead of Villager #3.  And who’s playing Grace, this time?  The understudy?  It says something that the people who managed to create indelible characters in Dogville –Kidman, Paul Bettany, Stellan Skarsgård – are nowhere to be found, this time.

It is almost comforting to see Udo Kier waving his Tommy gun around, again.

And the slaves?  The film’s plantation establishes their character by explicitly enumerating them; the ever-misanthropic director gleefully follows suit.  The performers do what they can.  Danny Glover is given little opportunity to do anything, and looks quite unhappy doing the little he has to do.  Isaach De Bankolé’s Timothy is a powerful figure, mostly because the overworked machinations of the plot force a lot of mystery on him.

The only character allowed to fully express himself is Our Humble Narrator.  John Hurt reads von Trier’s overworked prose with such nasty relish – really, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard him detail Grace’s masturbatorial efficiencies – it’s surprising the acid from the sound track doesn’t leak into the frame.  The narrator – who is, of course, really Lars von Trier – looks down (literally, in a stunning opening shot) on the proceedings, and down his nose at the participants.  Pawns.  Ants.

But:  Lars von Trier is also Grace.  Manderlay is, absolutely, a joke, and its punchline is that it cares.  I have strong doubts that – before directing the film – von Trier had even met an African-American (and Glover is the only African-American in the cast; the rest of the slaves are played by Europeans of color).  And, of course, he’s never been to America.  But it is he, not us, that knows how we really are.  That knows what’s really wrong with us.  By the time the credits roll – yes, again to David Bowie’s “Young Americans,” and over appropriately inflammatory imagery – you had better be laughing. 

Manderlay is a comedy, not a tragedy, because it chooses enlightenment over disillusionment.  It takes its self-important two-and-a-half hours and its self-hating “eight chapters” and very effectively pretends to have proven that meaning well for others is simply mean.  Ha!

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During the film’s shooting, it was highly publicized that actor John C. Reilly left the production when von Trier decided to kill a real donkey on set.  The donkey’s death was part of the film, and the director insisted it important that they use a real animal.

Well, the poor beast’s offing didn’t make the final cut.  His producer explained at the post-screening Q&A that von Trier didn’t want the incident to distract from the rest of the movie.  Bryce Howard, a vegan, spoke up in support of the director’s actions.

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[Warning:  Dogville spoilers, below.]

Though Dogville often seems to be about the same subject as Manderlay – arrogance – it features a completely different set of strengths.

More cunningly plotted than Manderlay, the film initially seems to be the construct of the hilariously-named Tom Edison, Jr. (Paul Bettany).  A self-aggrandizing writer – who, of course, doesn’t write anything – he epitomizes von Trier’s approach to contempt.  Tom professes to love the measly little town in which he lives, but spends all his time telling its folk just what’s wrong with them.  He wishes there were an illustrative example he could provide and – poof – enter Grace (Nicole Kidman).

On the run from some violent ne’er-do-wells, Grace stumbles into the tiny Colorado mountain hamlet and is quickly adopted by Tom.  His kindness and concern for her welfare is genuine... in that he feels that she’s exactly the element he needs to show his fellow villagers their inner ugliness.  In return for hiding Grace from the forces that are after her, she spends an hour in each household doing chores.  At first the residents are reluctant – they don’t need her help – but after being convinced she could be used for services they may not need, but want, they warm up to the idea.

And what they want is to degrade her, to make her as miserable as they are.

Running just under three hours, and telling its story over the course of nine “chapters” (plus prologue), Dogville can try your patience... which is just what it’s trying to do.  The abuses Grace suffers may escalate, but they grow repetitive and numbing, both to the audience and the character.  Von Trier is baiting his audience with martyrdom, here, creating a sort of passion play with a twist.

Though Grace is the protagonist, we’ve been fooled into thinking that it’s Tom’s story.  It makes sense:  He’s the writer, the philosopher that poses the question of Grace, and the movie plays out along the lines of his hypothesis.  The ultimate evil is Tom’s, as well:  While he self-righteously refuses to add to any physical abuse of Grace – he Loves her, you see – he has, out of his own selfish need for superiority, made her endure everyone else’s evil.  Just to prove a point.

It’s a storyteller’s malevolence, and von Trier digs further at himself:  Inspired by Grace’s fall, Tom writes, like, a whole page... and quickly announces it’s the start of what will turn out to be a trilogy.

The throughline that makes Dogville palatable, plotwise, is the mystery of Grace.  She could certainly have been written off as happenstance, some symbolic angel subject to the abhorrence of humanity.  But in a final blow against any moral uplift – as a groaning coup de grace – von Trier restructures the entire film as an argument of her own arrogance.  The dark powers she’s running from are nothing more than her own nasty nature:  Her mobster father (James Caan) wishes her no harm; he only wants to share his power with her.  It was her own indignant sense of nobility that caused her to run off to “find a place for her sorrow and her pain.”  In a sense, she – the victim, our heroine, our martyr – created the need for the lessons of Dogville; and as creator, she chooses to destroy them.

It’s her responsibility, after all.  And by gunning them down and setting fire to the town, she merely “gives them the chance to be accountable for their actions.”

Fun times, happy days.

Form fits function in von Trier’s film:  The movie, about arrogance, is arrogant.  It is overlong, pretentious, and often seems to hate its audience as much as its characters.  When Caan finally shows up, his mob boss would seem to guarantee action.  Instead, the director serves up what feels like a ten-minute conversation on the nature of arrogance in which it is revealed that the entire world’s genesis came from even more talk:  Grace criticized her father, and ran away.  He has come back only to tell her what he doesn’t like about her.  It’s a bit much, and perhaps the only payoff one deserves for sitting through a three-hour Lars von Trier film.

Kidman is a perfect choice, her actressy masochism – remember, this woman managed to stay married to Tom Cruise for years – matching her director’s sadism blow for blow.  She’s good enough that when her Grace is looking at gooseberry bushes the prop department has refused to provide, you know she’s actually seeing them, there.

The film’s biggest asset is its then-new approach to set design.  There are moments of real function to the strategy:  When Grace gets raped inside someone’s house, the open set makes it look like it’s happening in plain view.  All the townsfolk seem to be willfully ignoring it.  And von Trier finds ways to exploit the beauty of the minimalist surroundings:  Shadows of pretend buildings digitally shift across the ground, a church steeple magically hovers over a nonexistent foundation.  It seems so appropriate that the few moments of Dogville’s beauty come from things no one can see, things that aren’t really there.

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Manderlay screened as part of the 2005 New York Film Festival, and will open in the United States in late 2005-early 2006.  Dogville is available on DVD; the disc features a commentary with von Trier and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle during which the director playfully bitches at his D.P. (“Any idiot could have done that”) and complains that shooting the film in sequence “gave the actors a false sense of control.”

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And now, the lesbian sex:  If you enjoyed the redone Shining trailer that was bopping about the web a few weeks back, check out

the love so good it dared speak its name twice: 

Hayley Mills hearts Hayley Mills.

Go here, choose "Paul Lacalandra," and then click on "Ordinary Girls."  (via Neil Gaiman, believe it or not)

tags: manderlay  lars von trier  movie reviews  dogville  

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