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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Shot by Anthony Dod Mantle in watery, grainy color, the endless close-ups waver drunkenly on the screen. The movie is just as washed-out and ugly looking as "Breaking the Waves" and "Dancer in the Dark" were. (To talk about the aesthetic qualities of a von Trier movie is a joke.) The enforced drabness is summed up by what may be the most shocking sight in all of "Dogville": that of Lauren Bacall hoeing potatoes -- worse, miming hoeing potatoes. I keep thinking of moviegoers who saw "To Have and Have Not" when it opened in 1945 and were bowled over by that stunning, sexy, sarcastic girl: Did they ever imagine that one day they'd have to see her in a peasant role?
No matter how much von Trier disdains the slickness epitomized by Hollywood filmmaking, he's the unconscious heir of the hokey movie tradition of casting stars in roles unsuited to them. In one of their comedy routines Nichols and May once joked about Sal Mineo being cast as Ernest Hemingway. Is seeing Catherine Deneuve playing a factory worker in "Dancer in the Dark" any less ridiculous? Von Trier clearly thinks he's taking stars down a peg by casting them in these unglamorous roles. But he's also depending on their glamour to get people into the theater. And the only thing that sustains you through "Dogville" are the moments of movie-star glamour that Nicole Kidman projects.
Von Trier has established an amazing cast for "Dogville." In addition to Kidman and Bettany and Bacall, there's Ben Gazzara, Philip Baker Hall, Patricia Clarkson, Chloë Sevigny, Harriet Andersson, Jeremy Davies, Zeljko Ivanek, Blair Brown and James Caan. And not one of them is any good. If one or two of these actors were bad, you might conclude they were having an off day. When a group this talented, who work in so many different styles, is bad in toto, it's pretty clear that the director has no talent for directing actors.
And no interest either. It was a shock to see Harriet Andersson's name in the end credits. This is one of the great actresses who made her mark in Ingmar Bergman films like "Monika" and "Smiles of a Summer Night" -- and in "Dogville" she's simply tossed away in the undistinguished part of an old lady who runs the town store. The part could have been played by anyone, but von Trier's disdain is, I think, indicative of how little feel he has for films and for people. He's willing to turn anyone, no matter how great, into one of his pawns.
Von Trier is a conscious provocateur. He wants to pick at scabs, and I'm betting that he hopes people detest his movies as much as love them. For a director like von Trier, the former response is much more valuable, proof that he has touched a nerve. But he's the most humorless provocateur imaginable. With "Dogville," it's obvious that he wants to needle people into a response, and also obvious that if you are needled, you've taken his bait.
More than anything, that makes von Trier seem a director perfectly suited to this moment in the movies when ironic detachment is paramount. At nearly every stage of von Trier's career, from Dogme to "Dogville," there have been supporters ready to talk about him as a joker whose provocations are just provocations. Again and again in the reviews of "Dogville," you can read that the movie is not meant to be taken literally, that it's hard to take seriously, that what happens shouldn't really affect us because the movie operates as a fable or a fairy tale. Essentially what that view says is that the people in "Dogville" are as representational as the buildings we are left to imagine, that they are just stand-ins, and that what happens to them doesn't really matter as long as we get the point.
That way, I think, lies the end of any useful concept of art, the acceptance of any brutality as long as it's in the service of an idea, the encouragement of the belief that, since nothing that happens in a movie is real, it need not be taken seriously, that the people on the screen are actors and we shouldn't get worked up over how they or their characters are treated.
But the people we see in the closing credits of "Dogville" aren't actors. They are the subjects of photographs from the likes of Dorothea Lange and the Danish photographer Jacob Holdt's "American Pictures," a montage of the poorest and most damaged and wretched of Americans from the Depression to the present. Over this montage we hear David Bowie's "Young Americans." Are we meant to take these people as mere representations as well? Are we meant to have any human or aesthetic reaction to the misery these pictures show or just take them as proof of the three hours of playacting that has preceded them?
If there's any irony to "Dogville" it's one that von Trier hasn't intended. The movie is being acclaimed as a great indictment of the incipient fascism in American life, or a powerful statement about human venality. And yet it's been made by a director who sees his job as that of a puppet master ("To give up control you have to trust somebody, and it's easier for me to convince females to do this, for some reason"), who is willing to sacrifice the talent on-screen and the characters they portray to the greater glory of his "vision." If von Trier's supporters are really concerned with the themes of power and freedom and enslavement he pretends to address, should they really be kissing the backside of the fascist behind the camera?
