"Dogville": the American effect: in his latest film, set in a small isolated community during the Depression, Danish director Lars von Trier presents a bleak morality tale that takes a dim view of the U.S.—and of humankind - Film - Movie Review

Art in America, April, 2004 by Shelley Rice

Lars von Trier's film Dogville, a tour de force that opened in the U.S. in late March, almost a year after its debut in Europe, begins and ends with the howling of a chained canine named Moses. Set in a tiny town in the Rocky Mountains during the Depression, the narrative chronicles the misfortunes of Grace (Nicole Kidman), a young and beautiful fugitive who wanders into this remote locale on the run from a team of gangsters. Weak and in need, she is befriended by a young man named Tom (Paul Bettany), who takes it upon himself to help her; he persuades his neighbors to hide her in exchange for her labor, a deal that promises to benefit everyone in the community. All goes well until the police begin their search for Grace in earnest, and the people of Dogville, smelling blood, begin to demand a better deal in exchange for their risk in sheltering a fugitive. What transpires is a harsh and disturbing portrait of simple people overburdened by the dual yokes of power and poverty.

This basic plot outline allows readers to see the themes that link Dogville to the Danish director's earlier films, among them Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark: in all three of these movies, it is a female who suffers the consequences of the small minds and twisted moralities of people in insular societies. But the plot similarities don't prepare one for the sheer radicality of Dogville: its bare stage, its extraordinary acting (by Lauren Bacall, Patricia Clarkson and James Caan, among others), its pared-down theatricality, its bone-chilling conclusion. Von Trier speaks of the influence of Bertolt Brecht on this work, and also of the televised plays that were commonplace when he was young in the 1970s. Several critics have mentioned the Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt (1921-1990), whose tragicomedy The Visit (1955) chronicles an equally fateful encounter between a mysterious woman and an isolated community, and does so in a similarly abstract way. Durrenmatt's play was set in a small town "somewhere in Central Europe." Von Trier's film is set in the U.S., but both deliberately minimize their settings, thereby generalizing their statements beyond national borders and creating parables of the human condition. "Yes," von Trier said in an interview, Dogville "is about the United States but it's also about any small town anywhere in the world."

In order to accomplish this transformation of a historical time and place into a metaphorical space, the director employs several abstracting devices. The three-hour drama's scenes are divided into a prologue and nine "chapters," like a 19th-century novel. There is a lot of voiceover narration. The action takes place on a nearly empty stage articulated only by painted lines on the floor and a few scattered objects, which represent the town in its entirety. There are very few props; drab costumes and ample dirt (especially on actors' hair and faces) suggest grim economic circumstances. The scenes unfold either on the main street or in the individual "houses" that line it, but since all of these places are without walls, the town becomes a fishbowl where everyone and everything are constantly on display. Only a few freestanding doorways, through which the characters pass, establish a sense of vertical scale. The audience, shocked at first, soon adjusts to the environment, and begins navigating through the virtual space of gooseberry bushes and general stores, imagining the details of individual houses and memorizing the placement of "landmarks" that are defined only by white lines and words on the dark floor.

It is, in fact, the human capacity to make something out of nothing that is at the heart of this story, which rushes forward on the strength of assumptions and lies, misunderstandings and omissions. The only street in the town is called "Elm Street," and was so named by stone homesick East Coast traveler unfazed by the fact that there are no such trees in the region. At some point during the film, the narrator tells us that squirrels occasionally wander down the road in search of the nonexistent elms. Dogville is, similarly, von Trier's search for, and interaction with, America: the image of America he has seen in photographs, in films, on television. Never having visited the U.S., he has fabricated an illusion out of bits and pieces of information, and allowed this illusion to transmute into allegory.

Moses and Grace, for instance, are the names of central characters in the drama; an important plot turn hinges on the epiphany of a Blind Man (Ben Gazzara). The self-proclaimed town spokesman, Grace's supposed savior and love interest, is named Tom Edison, and he certainly sees himself as the Bringer of Light to his community. It is on his insistence that the townspeople agree to harbor Grace, as a "gift" that will teach them openness and acceptance. A writer who never puts pen to paper, Tom instead calls town meetings to discuss "illustrations" of spiritual issues, and invents "games" that might lead to "moral rearmament."