The dogs that we hear yapping throughout Lars von Trier's Dogville are seen only as two-dimensional chalk outlines sketched on a bare floor. But their bite is every bit as real as their bark.
And to practically no one's surprise, the real dogs of Dogville — the ones with the sharpest teeth of all — turn out to be the humans.
In the dog-eat-dog world of Dogville, it's a tossup as to what's worse: the things you don't see coming or what's right there in front of your face. As with most of von Trier's films (Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves), Dogville takes a distinctly Hobbesian view of life and then pounds it home in ways both nasty and brutish, although not terribly short. The movie clocks in at very close to three hours, making for an experience that's both grueling and, in its way, glorious.
Any way you look at it, Von Trier's film is a devastating indictment of human nature — but, incredibly enough, it may not be the most devastating one hitting movie theaters this week. That dubious honor might just go to a little teen-oriented comedy that, if there's any justice in this world, will soon be ruling the megaplexes. But more on that later.
As for Dogville, it's about as far from a teen comedy as you'll get. Von Trier's densely constructed, three-hour opus is an audacious act of cinematic subversion, one bound to thoroughly alienate a great many of those drawn in by the film's buzz or by the big names featured in its amazing ensemble cast (Nicole Kidman! Ben Gazzara! James Caan! Lauren Bacall, for God's sake!).
Make no mistake, though: Dogville is a full-blown, high-concept manifesto, and one of the most difficult, demanding and potentially off-putting films ever to be shown in an American megaplex. It is also, I think, an altogether amazing work of art — at least for the first two and a half of its three-hour running time.
The movie tells us right up front that it takes place during "wicked times," which presumably means the Great Depression of the 1930s (although pretty much every time and place in a von Trier film qualifies as a Great Depression of some sort). The story is set in motion when a beautiful and mysterious fugitive named Grace (Kidman) wanders into the sleepy, little Rocky Mountain township of Dogville and encounters what the film tells us are the "good honest folks" who live there.
There are no actual quotation marks surrounding the words "good honest folks," but there may as well be, what with all the irony dripping. The inhabitants of Dogville turn out to include hypocrites and sadists of all stripes, guilt-ridden whoremongers and mutually loathing couples burdened with too many kids, too little money, and a paralyzing fear of the world. No one ever leaves the town and everyone is basically just waiting for a chance to exploit someone else, all of which feeds into what von Trier apparently wants to tell us about greedy, provincial Americans. More of that later, too.
Still, most of these people seem nice enough at first. Grace and the town adopt one another, and the pretty stranger soon begins helping out to earn her keep, getting her delicate, alabaster hands dirty by doing various odd jobs and good deeds for the locals. There's an oddly formal but seemingly benign quality to the arrangement, but it eventually turns ugly. Very ugly.
As the townsfolk become increasingly aware of Grace's value (she's a wanted woman on the lam from both cops and crooks), everyone starts demanding more from her. Eventually, she goes from being the community's nurturing sister/mother figure to its scapegoat, whore and slave. In the end, Grace's fall is complete, reducing her to little more than an object upon which the entire town freely enacts its most debasing sadomasochistic fantasies.
Dogville is tough viewing, without a doubt, but it's also further proof that von Trier, who is certainly among the cinema's most provocative and perverse artists, might also be one of its true visionaries. The director reportedly refers to Dogville as "filmed theater," but anti-theater seems closer to the mark. The entire movie is performed on what appears to be a sound stage, a bare-bones set composed of nothing but chalk marks sketched on the floor and a handful of props to indicate what we're supposed to imagine existing there. An old bed or a chair represents somebody's house, a small tree stands in for an entire apple orchard, and the whole town simply ends where the stage fades into darkness.
It's as if nothing exists outside of Dogville and the endless void in which it floats — sort of like that vacuum-packed village created by little Billy Mummy in that old Twilight Zone episode (the one where human-headed jack-in-the-boxes get wished to the cornfield). Or maybe it's a high school production of Our Town staged in Hell. I've got your microcosm right here on the screen, baby, von Trier seems to be sneering, so don't even think about looking anywhere else for answers. There are no higher powers or significant outside influences in the world of Dogville. What you see is what you get.
The film's austere, anti-design constantly reminds us of the empty, arid spaces exposed by von Trier's tale, with the town of Dogville laid out like a two-dimensional grid as perfectly dispassionate as a Flaubert sentence and as inescapable as the characters' destinies. There's an almost mathematical inevitability to the unfolding of the tragedy of Dogville that calls to mind Emma Bovary, just as the eloquent but direct voice-over narration (beautifully delivered by John Hurt) recalls, again, the precisely calibrated language of Flaubert.
The almost classic nature of the movie's structure and language (aided and abetted by some tasteful and ultra-traditional baroque music) stands in marked contrast to the film's in-your-face experimentation, making Dogville a thing of rich and maddening contradictions. All this might seem especially odd coming from von Trier, the man who founded Dogme — a movement dedicated to smashing everything in the movies that goes against reality. But Dogville's artifice is so extreme it practically swallows its own tail, eventually coming full circle to a place where we become convinced that what we're experiencing on the screen is the very essence of reality.
Dogville is the first part of what von Trier has said will eventually form his "American trilogy," and, beyond its famous Hollywood actors, the movie is sprinkled with immediately recognizable Yankee myths, symbols and icons such as the Fourth of July, flags, privilege, pie and gangsters. Still, the film works because it feels more universal than specific to any one country or culture — right up until its final half hour, when Dogville makes a ham-fisted, eleventh-hour attempt at transforming the human soul sickness it has so carefully detailed into a specifically American disease.
Without giving away too much, let's just say that the final act of von Trier's film is clearly meant as catharsis, but it simply feels overwrought, underthought and worst of all, preachy. With a few clumsy gestures and a closing photo-montage of all that's worst in the U.S.A. (accompanied by Bowie crooning "Young Americans," just in case we still don't get the point), von Trier not only drops the ball, he practically breaks it into pieces.
It's a final gesture so simplistic and condescending it almost ruins what is an otherwise astonishing movie. For almost three hours, Dogville is a model of what's best in European art films, but for its final few minutes it becomes just one more example of why Americans don't much like Europeans these days.
As usual, though, we Americans save our tastiest slurs for each other, a principal illustrated with abundant nasty wit by Mean Girls, that fine little teen comedy we mentioned about 1200 words ago. (You thought we'd completely forgotten, didn't you?)
The movie's philosophy — "There are two kinds of people: those who do evil stuff, and those who see evil stuff and don't stop it" — is straight out of Dogville, as is its premise. Both films are about beautiful fugitives who enter new environments and get taken in by locals who turn out to be monsters. In Mean Girls, the new environment is high school, and the protagonist is a student named Cady (Lindsay Lohan), who is embraced and then cast aside by a clique of popular girls called "The Plastics."
Mean Girls was written by Tina Fey, the brilliant head writer of Saturday Night Live, and it might just be the funniest and most spot-on movie about high school since Welcome to the Dollhouse or Heathers. The movie has a ball picking apart the rigid and elaborately cruel codifications of high school life — how students are identified and categorized according to everything from what they wear to where they sit — and it does it all with considerable smarts. Like Dogville, Mean Girls also has last-act problems, but, on the whole, Fey has crafted a lean, mean entertainment that manages to be both playful and subversive while exhibiting plenty of mainstream appeal.
It's tempting but counterproductive to think of Mean Girls as the anti-Dogville, since the two movies essentially share the same worldview. The difference is that Dogville chooses the path of high art to conjure up anger, alienation and exhaustion, while Mean Girls depicts the world as one big banana peel waiting to be slipped on. Like the ugly Americans that von Trier seems so afraid of, Dogville revels in confronting us with lines in the sand that cry out "Love It or Leave It." Meanwhile, Mean Girls just smiles through the pain and remembers to leave us laughing.
Contact Film Critic Lance Goldenberg at 813-248-8888, ext. 157, or lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Apr 29 – May 5, 2004.