Dogville

Synopsis: In a tiny Colorado mountain village, Dogville, during the Depression, Tom Edison (Paul Bettany), the town's self-appointed philosopher and moralist, hears gunshots from the valley below and then the sound of a dog barking. The cause of this commotion is Grace (Nicole Kidman), a woman who is fleeing some gangsters. Just before they arrive in town, Tom offers her sanctuary in the mine. The head gangster gives him a card with his telephone number and promises a large reward for her return to him. Has Grace found a safe-haven?

Most people are now familiar with Von Trier’s work with the Dogme group of Danish film-makers who have produced a surprisingly successful number of films that proscriptively reject Hollywood trickery in favour of a cinema verite approach to storytelling. Dogville is not a Dogme film (although there is a lot of gratuitous hand-held camera movement) but, as also most will be aware, it adopts an extremely spare approach, more familiar from theatre, of simply mapping its supposed location onto a studio floor and using a few props to signify the different settings within it. This allows us to focus on the two elements of text and performance, or to look at it another way, leaves nothing to distract from them.

Written by Von Trier as the first part of his proposed USA: Land of Opportunities trilogy (the second instalment being Manderlay (2005),the film, has been widely, although not unequivocally, praised, and discussed as a critique of American culture. Stylistically it is reminiscent of strongly left-leaning, social conscience theatre and literature of the period in which it is set - America during the 1930s, the era of the Great Depression and The New Deal (the anomalous combination of Walker Evans and David Bowie in the end credits drives this point home in case we had failed to appreciate it) - The Group Theater, Theodore Dreiser, Clifford Odets and Eugene O’Neill. Paul Bettany’s Tom is indeed one such would-be writer, a character who acts as an observer within the story just as John Hurt’s richly-mulled narrator’s voice acts as an observer outside it.

Whilst Von Trier’s script is very effective as a nostalgia piece in this tendentious manner, it is not clear how the film works as contemporary cultural criticism. at least of America. Whilst Dogville is commendable in its thematic concentration (and often by virtue of is sparseness, visually striking). it does not as did, say, Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989), issue a challenge to its audience, but remains closed-in on itself, more of an allegorical fairytale, full of hobgoblins and fear, one that one finishes with a certain amount of relief (as if recognizing this the immaturity of Australian audiences, the local release print is 2 hours 20 mins whereas internationally audiences receive the ‘adult’ version at just under 3 hours, although arguably the shortened version is more than enough already).

There are no end of examples of filmic criticisms of small-town small-mindedness, a characteristic which is of course, not exclusively American. A personal favourite which comes to mind, and which has resemblances with Von Trier’s film, is Invitation To A Gunfighter (1964) in which Yul Brynner’s gun-for-hire has a similar revenge to that of Nicole Kidman’s character. Whereas that choice worked within the context of the Western (compare also Unforgiven), it does not sit right in Von Trier’s film, which at this point starts to feel like a minimalist version of Road To Perdition, and which in the end is more about his personal disaffection from his fellows (who are depicted as the dogs of Dogsville) and fantasies of apocalyptic retribution than any reasoned moral position.

Nicole Kidman has won lavish praise as the main female character and she brings a frailty and detached dignity to her humiliation in a performance which elicits a good deal of empathy.Aside from the already-mentioned Paul Bettany who is excellent opposite Kidman there’s a strong cast all who acquit themselves well..

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