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Much has been made of the supposedly anti-American attitude behind Dogville, Danish director Lars von Trier’s (Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves) latest portrait of a woman wronged by society...
...callous end-credits, which set Walker Evans’ famous photographs of impoverished southerners to the strains of David Bowie’s “Young Americans”. One called the film’s message “Taliban thinking” to von Trier’s face, while another wrote that “for any American, seeing such nakedly hateful sentiments expressed by a filmmaker such as von Trier should be as terrifying as a replay of those jets plowing into the World Trade Center...
Even as the action unfolds in a Rocky Mountains village of von Trier’s invention, the film’s statement about the nature of humanity is clearly far more general than a shrill denunciation of the American dream or George W. Bush’s administration. Like many a great dramatic work—think Richard III or Oedipus Rex—the setting is merely a backdrop for the message. A misanthropic deconstruction of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town, Dogville draws very much on theatrical (and literary) conventions in order to depart...
Dogville springs not only from von Trier’s imagination, but from our own—like in Wilder’s town, there are no sets. The action was filmed on a Swedish soundstage, the floor marked with white outlines where houses, bushes, and even a dog should be, abstractions the characters accept as concrete structures but which the audience must build in their own minds...
...about three hours, one might expect difficulty briefly summarizing the film’s plot. Grace (Nicole Kidman) arrives in Dogville on the run from some unnamed danger. The villagers take her in and then turn on her. The ending shocks and leaves the audience full of questions, which von Trier presumably will answer in the rest of the trilogy, albeit without Kidman as the lead...