"Dogville"

Lars von Trier's Depression-era fable has been labeled "anti-American," but it's even worse: It's anti-human.

By Charles Taylor

Mar 26, 2004 | Susan Sontag infamously remarked that the white race was a cancer on humanity. To Lars von Trier, humanity is the cancer. Von Trier's "Dogville" caused a great stir at last year's Cannes Film Festival with charges that the Depression-era fable, set in a rural town in the Colorado Rockies, was anti-American. It is. But anti-Americanism is a small matter when a movie is anti-human.

"Dogville" is as total a misanthropic vision as anything control freak Stanley Kubrick ever turned out. Von Trier, for all his studied technical incompetence, is just as deliberate a filmmaker as Kubrick, but his misanthropy feels both more virulent and more conscious than Kubrick's chilly demonstrations of technical proficiency.

At three hours, and as the first film in a projected trilogy, "Dogville" strains for the epic. This is von Trier's Big Statement (or at least grandiose throat clearing). But in every respect other than sheer length -- in scope, imagination, execution, depth and spirit -- "Dogville" is a piddling movie.

That hasn't stopped it from being widely acclaimed as a masterpiece. Are the critics who are rhapsodizing over "Dogville" actually swallowing its puny, rancid view of humanity or are they afraid that slamming it means they'd be showing themselves not tough enough to take its hard truths? Reading the raves for "Dogville," I've thought of the girl in Michael Ritchie's "Semi-Tough" who announces at an encounter group, "I peed in my pants and it felt good." Except that to get any pleasure out of "Dogville" you'd have to say, "I was peed on and it felt good."

Bullies can be just as persuasive in the arts as they are on the playground and von Trier is nothing if not a consummate bully. An American critic who slams "Dogville" opens him- or herself up to the usual charges of Americans being unwilling to face the ugly truths about their country (no matter how facile or smug or uninformed those "truths" are). But any critic who rejects the film is open to being told they can't accept dark, pessimistic art, that they'd prefer nice movies. That's a very macho vision of the arts, in which the "hissing naysayers" (as one critic called those of us who reject the film -- and let me own up: When I saw it at the New York Film Festival last fall, I hissed) should just go back to our nice humanist movies and leave the heavy lifting to the tough-minded.

But put "Dogville" next to the juice flowing through any great, vital misanthropic art, from Swift to Thackeray to Celine (to W.C. Fields, for that matter), and the thesis dryness of von Trier's work becomes clear. Artists can be just as withering as they like about any milieu, any period, as long as they allow the characters to be fully formed and not just stick figures set up to make their points. "Dogville" is getting talked of as being a raw and demanding experience, but the educated, liberal moviegoers who will constitute its audience won't hear anything they aren't already primed to hear. Von Trier is preaching to the converted here as much as Mel Gibson is in "The Passion of the Christ," and those of us who aren't ready to hear the message are, to von Trier's acolytes, just as much heretics.

As was "Breaking the Waves" and "Dancer in the Dark," "Dogville" is about the degradation and torture of a beautiful young woman. (The critic Greg Tate nailed it in the Village Voice when he referred to the director as "Lars 'The Bitch Killer' von Trier.") In this case, as in "Breaking the Waves," it's specifically sexual torture.

Nicole Kidman plays Grace (cue the distant drums of approaching irony), a fugitive (from what we don't know) who turns up on the outskirts of Dogville. The town's resident young intellectual, Tom Edison (I swear I'm not making that up; he's played by Paul Bettany), has been exhorting the mostly bored townfolk to improve themselves, and in Grace he sees his chance to help both them and her. Tom convinces the residents of Dogville to allow Grace to help them with their chores, in exchange for which she'll be given room and board. Grace's hard work and sweet smile soon make her a welcome addition -- until strangers come to town bearing wanted posters with Grace's face and offering a substantial reward.

From there "Dogville" becomes the longest exercise yet in the Lars von Trier Theatre of Cruelty. When Grace tries to get away, a cement wheel that she has to drag everywhere is attached to a manacle around her neck. Grace is raped repeatedly, and used by the men as the town whore. And the women find ways to inflict their own humiliations. (Three hours allows for a lot of humiliation.)

But where the whipping posts played by Emily Watson in "Breaking the Waves" and Bjork in "Dancer in the Dark" are sacrificial victims, Grace is von Trier's avenging angel. She gets her revenge in the end, and it's so much worse than what's been inflicted on her that whatever sympathy we might have had for her (or, to put it more specifically, for Nicole Kidman's heroic attempt to give a performance in this swill) is rubbed in our face.

It's clear that's what von Trier intends. He wants, I think, to fool us into identifying with Grace, though by the end we're meant to be in the same position as Tom. Our sympathy for Grace mirrors his good intentions. That she turns so villainous is meant to make both good intentions and sympathy seem the province of fools.

Next Page: Von Trier: "To give up control you have to trust somebody, and it's easier for me to convince females to do this"

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