Film: Billy Elliot goes gun crazy

A few weeks after he glowered his way through Undertow, Jamie Bell proves once again that if you need a gawky. brooding youth to fit in a remote, semi-mythical American setting, he's the man to call. In Dear Wendy he plays a lowly shelf-stacker in a mining town that's had no more than a lick of paint since the days of the Wild West. He's an avowed pacifist, but when he accidentally acquires an antique pistol, he and a friend become shooting enthusiasts and invite the town's other misfits to join them in a fanciful secret gun club they call the Dandies.

While Thomas Vinterberg, the maker of Festen, loads the film with sepia- toned, cinematic style, it's scripted by Lars von Trier in the high-flown allegorical manner he employed in Dogville. Its literary artifice will have some viewers reaching for their revolvers, but von Trier's writing has the kind of richness, elegance and integrity that you don't often get in films. A timeless but topical all-American fable from two Danes and a Brit.

n.barber@independent.co.uk

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