"Dear Wendy": Real gunplay in a fake America
When I interviewed Cronenberg, I hadn't yet realized that a new chapter, sort of, in Lars von Trier's ongoing evisceration of America -- or at least of his fantastical notion of America -- would soon be available. "Dear Wendy" is a script von Trier decided not to direct, handing it off to his Danish colleague and friend Thomas Vinterberg. The result is a bizarre admixture of realistic wounded-teen drama and inflated tragic allegory, not as stagy as von Trier's "Dogville" but not as low-key naturalistic as Vinterberg's "The Celebration," one of the best films to emerge from the not-entirely-serious Dogme movement.

At its most literal level, "Dear Wendy" is the story of a group of teenage losers in a Southern mining town who begin packing antique firearms and style themselves as the Dandies, a group halfway between a secret boys' club out of a Stephen King story and a violent gang. Led by a charismatic orphaned teen named Dick (played by insta-star Jamie Bell, he of "Billy Elliott" and Peter Jackson's forthcoming "King Kong"), the Dandies are pacifists, sworn never to draw their guns in anger. When they're joined by a suave African-American kid (Danso Gordon) who really knows about guns, their social compact comes unglued, and a violent catastrophe results.

But nothing in the movie is never anywhere near that straightforward. While Vinterberg plays the early scenes as downbeat pseudo-Depression realism, the town of Estherslope (whose central square is called "Electric Park") is so thoroughly unconvincing it has to be deliberately so. It's not merely that "Dear Wendy" was shot on Danish and German locations that don't look quite right; it's that almost every decision made by the production designers is wrong, or at least discordant.

The cars are from the '80s and '90s, but the unpainted storefronts and dreary signage belong to the '30s. This is a town with no chain stores, no TVs, no car radios blaring rap or country music. The clothing is modern without being specific. Beyond a single reference to Vietnam, some classic hits by the Zombies and a San Diego Padres cap, there's no evidence that politics, history or pop culture has touched Estherslope. In this context, I'm suspicious of the mistakes that look at first like European cluelessness: The car belonging to the crusty sheriff (Bill Pullman) says "Police" on the side; the area codes have only two digits.

Furthermore, if you spend any time on film-geek bulletin boards, you begin to understand that von Trier and Vinterberg have packed the film with references and quotations drawn from Stanley Kubrick's movies. I missed most of these on first viewing, although the similarity between the Dandies and the violent band of "droogs" in "A Clockwork Orange" is evident, and there's a glaring "Doctor Strangelove" gag amid the mayhem of the concluding scenes. Given that Kubrick became infamous for his refusal to leave England -- even shooting a film there that was set in Vietnam -- you could say that the universe of "Dear Wendy" is contiguous with his.

Vinterberg has said that he tried, within the confines of von Trier's stylized script, to tell a realistic human story about the love of weapons as a defining force in the Western world. Indeed, Dick and his fellow Dandies Stevie (Mark Webber), Susan (Alison Pill) and Huey (Chris Owen) are an appealing group of characters who rise out of the movie's artificial murkiness. They're real, likable kids, stuck in a world that resembles an endless "Twilight Zone" episode. If the only way to end the episode is to drag a senile black lady through the streets of Estherslope while they shoot it out with a phalanx of heavily armed cops, they're prepared to get it on.

Those who yowl about the perceived anti-Americanism of "Dear Wendy," or its troubling racial politics, are pretty much falling into Vinterberg and von Trier's trap. It's not that "Dear Wendy" is a hoax, exactly, but that it's just trying to do the impossible: to be tragic and comic and fake and real and heartbreaking and as grossly ultraviolent as Sam Peckinpah's worst nightmare all at the same time. I'd characterize it as a fascinating failure, a minor-key "Fight Club" that may develop a cult following. Its landscape is the landscape of movies, not of reality; but its insight is that we're in the movies and the movies are in us, and none of us is too sure where the dividing line lies.

"Dear Wendy" opens nationwide Sept. 23.

"Forty Shades of Blue": What American film once was, and could be again
In any other week of the year, pretty much, I'd have significantly more love available to lavish on Ira Sachs' "Forty Shades of Blue," a compelling family melodrama somewhat in the manner of late John Cassavetes or early Robert Altman. The story of a legendary Memphis soul-music producer (played by the great Rip Torn) who's gradually losing his ice-blonde Russian girlfriend (a knockout performance by Dina Korzun), the film combines high production values, terrific acting and a distinctively American lyricism in a combination you hardly ever see these days.

Now a craggy, blocky man in late middle age, Torn is predictably terrific as Alan, a blustery tycoon who has built an empire but barely notices the emotions of those around him. But "Forty Shades of Blue" really belongs to Korzun, an extraordinary beauty who can also look, when conditions demand, like an angry, vulnerable child. At first, her Laura seems like the archetypal Moscow trophy wife: alcoholic, shopaholic, vain and perennially distracted, with her emotions never quite under control. When she brings home a random guy and then kicks him out (while Alan is boffing one of his singers), the house isn't empty: Alan's adult son Michael (Darren Burrows) has just gotten to town and is watching from the next room.

So Laura and Michael don't exactly start off on the right foot, but that soon changes. Michael's stuck in an unhappy marriage with a pregnant wife, and he and Laura of course have the larger-than-life Alan in common, as the source of both material well-being and numerous emotional wounds. There's nothing terribly daring or unconventional about the way Michael and Laura move from emotional intimacy into something more, but the film's combination of lustrous surface and surprising depth belongs to another time -- the past, yes, but maybe also the future.

If Michael is revealed as more his father's son than he wants to admit, Laura blossoms into a tragic heroine worthy of Tolstoy. She has cashed in on her beauty but now dares to want more; despite all the evidence around her, in the country she came from and the one where she wound up, she believes in love. As she and Michael sit in a parked car in a rainy diner lot, with her toddler son asleep in the back seat, she tells him that she has more than anyone she has ever known. The real discovery is that it still isn't enough. "Forty Shades of Blue" is a breakthrough work by a major new talent in American film. If audiences beyond the big coastal cities don't get to see this, shame on all of us.

"Forty Shades of Blue" opens Sept. 28 at Film Forum in New York, and Oct. 7 in Los Angeles.

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