Die, Thy Blasphemous Country!
Lars von Trier returns ablaze with Manderlay, as our subjected nation’s film critics slouch for cover

By Shawn Wines

Part I: Where Danish madman auteur Lars “von” Trier completes the second film in his USA – Land of Opportunities trilogy, about a loathed place he has never visited nor plans to.

Manderlay, though a stand-alone picture, picks up exactly where 2003’s Dogville left off, following privileged Grace and her Mafioso father to the sprawling Alabama plantation in the film’s title. The year is 1933, but that hardly matters to the settlers there, who still practice slavery a full 70 years after its abolishment. Grace, the symbol of headstrong, naive idealism and empathy, sets out to emancipate the dozen black slaves from the stubborn, white family who owns them.

From this basic spark of schema, director Lars von Trier weaves a long, intricate and messy fire-trail of responsibility, vengeance and freedom across the plot’s surface, but from a bird’s eye view his literal stage is charred with Machiavellian acts of immolation, where no signs of redemption are salvaged.

Like Dogville, the sequel takes place on an almost bare soundstage with floor-markings on the set, no walls, and imaginary props, including doors that eliminate the viewer’s notion of privacy. So much was written on Dogville’s avant-garde style, much of it praising von Trier for making a captivating drama with all the resources of an early rehearsal off Broadway, that to rehash it for Manderlay is redundant; but if one’s not familiar, imagine Stanley Kubrick, perhaps infinitely fed-up with modern film’s fetish for excessive technology and stop-clock editing, fiercely stripped down a socio-political film posing as a period piece, until all that remained was a confrontational, literal essence.

However, even if Manderlay wanted to, it cannot coast by on the same risky style-points. We’re no longer enthralled by the “movie without walls” gimmick. For Manderlay to be labeled great, the acting and themes need to equal or surpass its much-debated predecessor, which was undeniably brilliant.

And von Trier, who inserted the “von” into his name during college, is certainly aware and more than willing to face the high stakes mounted by America’s chief film critics, his creativity so brash it practically teethes off air.

Thus, we find him creeping head-on into the film’s enticing racially-fueled storyline, immediately punctuating actors’ lines with raw, subtle hidden-meanings, until it plays like a voyeuristic film screening inside his loud, roguish, voyeuristic mind.

Manderlay is singular, more like a poem than a movie, given its preferences for symbolism and stately emotion, not to mention several multi-layered allegories on current American politics. Discovering these parallels is one of the great rewards for smart audiences seeing smart movies: Manderlay could be Iraq, the “slaves” of which are also being “freed” by democracy and good-faith, mostly against their will, with no less disastrous a transition. Von Trier, who also wrote the screenplay, then, is the poet, clunking away furiously at a typewriter in a deserted room peppered with crumpled pages deemed not mean or biting enough.

Von Trier the director is always bearing down on von Trier the writer, whose heavy, at times humorously crass and controlling dialogue is magnified by the filmmaker’s preference for minimalism. In 1995, von Trier helped create the Dogme 95 movement, which prescribed a list of 10 tyrannical rules designed to make movies real again (instead it somehow made foreign films even less tolerable). Von Trier has officially adhered to the rules just once, although he loosely follows the tenets in all his works, making for very self-conscious, handheld and unbalanced cinematic experiences.

The ghostly camerawork on display here induces no added comfort, but what’s more queasy about Manderlay is the implication that America is racist as a society, maybe even more in 1933 than during slavery, and maybe even more now than in 1933. Observing that the year von Trier picks falls precisely halfway between the Emancipation Proclamation and the present is no accident–this is no period piece, but a timeless battlefield decrying race relations, and thereby, people of all races in America, who, once susceptible to this nation’s thirst for oppression, become the oppressors when given the chance to be “free.”

But their change-of-heart is not instant, von Trier implies, since oppression is proven to be nearly as addictive as its counterpart, bringing odd security in the form of fixed routines and hierarchical positions that purposely serve to highlight the complexities of the unknown. Or, Manderlay also proposes, does this hesitation to actually act freed once “free” have a darker, more methodological reasoning?

Part II: Where actress Bryce Dallas Howard aptly takes over the role formerly played by Nicole Kidman, who had a crippling case of scheduling conflicts.

Grace wants to free the slaves because, yes, she wants to do the right thing. She angrily justifies numerous times that white people took thesepeople out of Africa and her responsibility as a white is to set them free. The character’s heavy dose of post-adolescent naivety is a believable fit for actress Bryce Dallas Howard, a rookie hot shot 14-years the junior to Dogville’s Nicole Kidman.

With her gangster father’s crude, let-her-learn blessing, Grace tries to educate the slaves and instill a democracy, which ends up working against her, and her reasons for remaining in Manderlay churn from charitable to hospitable to selfish and destructive.

As she helps the slaves, she enslaves the white plantation overseers, assigning them grueling work and keeping them locked away from town affairs. The biggest fault of Manderlay is the inexplicable underdevelopment of the white family, including the underutilized Chloe Sevigny, all of whom are jerked in and out of the storyline at random. In a film this calculated, is this a mistake, or is von Trier joining Grace in punishing them somehow by keeping them off camera, on a wide-open set where the audience is entitled to every occurrence?

Grace’s simmering ruthlessness builds and builds, with several faux-climaxes before her repressed anger explodes at the end in sex and violence, fulfilling her father’s prediction, so memorably fleshed out by the stark, devilish persona of Willem Dafoe.

The mostly untested Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village) is stunning as Grace, playfully dumbing down the character a notch, but also bringing a more versatile range of emotion than Kidman, whose fame and European sensibility never quite vanished beneath this American princess’ dirtied face. Danny Glover, too, is fantastic as the less-is-more leader of the slaves, and there’s not a weak link in the cast, all of whom grasp the quizzical enigmas of their characters.

Part III: Where Lars “von” Trier lures American audiences down a well-paced path of self-hatred for an encore of David Bowie’s “Young Americans.”

For Dogville, von Trier served up one of film’s coldest, sadist and unexpected revenge endings as a treat of unanimous celebration for the audience, an amazing feat of manipulation.

In Manderlay, he takes the manipulation even further, allowing the audience to once again like Grace, albeit cautiously, to such an extent that we not only see past her mistakes, we actually condone and project them onto ourselves. For whites, it’s especially guilt-inspiring, but the true purposefulness of von Trier’s effort is not lost on alert viewers: the similarity in character of a nation’s people supersedes the bonds held by their respective creeds.

Again, von Trier is gunning for all of us and the centuries of racial blasphemy we have allowed under our collective, distracted, barely-registering radar. While von Trier can’t be so insane as to believe all Americans are drink-the-Kool-Aid racists, he is certainly stubborn enough to blame 100 percent of us for the 51 percent who reelected George W. Bush.

Launching a rocket, von Trier filters his scathing contempt into pure concentrate with an ending credit photo montage to compliment Dogville’s, again set satirically to David Bowie’s upbeat “Young Americans.” When Bowie asks, “Do you remember your President Nixon,” a photo of Bush arrives right on cue. The credits’ last photograph shows a black man hard at work, scrubbing Abraham Lincoln’s massive, marble beard at his Washington memorial. Oh, and as for the final film in the trilogy? It’s slated to begin production next year, with both Howard and Kidman rumored to be onboard and is entitled Wasington, with an approximate theatrical release date in 2008, the year America elects its next president. [shivers]

Impossible for film critics to slouch calmly into their 500-word routine review templates, Manderlay will most likely be trampled or quickly dismissed by the domestic press, without the perfume chum of a big star to propel coverage. But all partisan takes on politics and double-meanings aside, this is a very solid, difficult follow-up in what is fast becoming a most unprecedented, provoking trilogy for this decade and one that won’t (naturally) gather dust anytime soon.