Dogville

Plot synopsis:
Dogville is a very small American town in the Rocky Mountains with a road leading up to it, but nowhere to go but the mountains. The film begins with a prologue in which we meet a dozen or so of the fifteen citizens. They are portrayed as lovable, good people with small flaws which are easy to forgive.The town is seen from the point of view of Tom Edison (Paul Bettany), an aspiring writer who procrastinates by trying to get his fellow citizens together for regular meetings on the subject of "moral rearmament." It is clear that Tom wants to succeed his aging father as the moral and spiritual leader of the town.It is Tom who first meets Grace (Nicole Kidman), who is on the run from gangsters who apparently shot at her. Grace, a beautiful but modest woman, wants to keep running, but Tom assures her that the mountains ahead are too difficult to pass. As they talk, the gangsters approach the town, and Tom quickly hides Grace in a nearby mine. One of the gangsters asks Tom if he has seen the woman, which he denies, and so the gangster offers him a reward and hands him a card with a phone number to call in case Grace shows up.Tom decides to use Grace as an "illustration" in his next meeting - a way for the townspeople to prove that they are indeed committed to community values, and willing to help the stranger. They remain skeptical, so Tom proposes that Grace should be given a chance to prove that she is a good person. Grace is accepted for two weeks in which, as Tom explains to her after the meeting, she has to convince the townspeople to like her.On Tom's suggestion, Grace offers to do chores for the citizens - talking to the lonely, blind Jack McCay (Ben Gazzara), helping to run the small shop, looking after the children of Chuck (Stellan Skarsgård) and Vera (Patricia Clarkson), and so forth. After some initial reluctance, the people accept her help in doing those chores that "nobody really needs" but which nevertheless make life better, and so she becomes a part of the community.In tacit agreement, she is expected to continue her chores, which she does gladly, and is even paid small wages in return. Grace begins to make friends, including Jack, who pretends that he is not blind. Grace tricks him into admitting that he is blind, earning his respect. After the two weeks are over, everyone votes that she should be allowed to stay.But when the police arrive to place a "Missing" poster with Grace's picture and name on it on the mission house, the mood darkens slightly. Should they not cooperate with the police?Still, things continue as usual until the 4th of July celebrations. After Tom awkwardly admits his love to Grace and the whole town expresses their agreement that it has become a better place thanks to her, the police arrive again to replace the "Missing" poster with a "Wanted" poster. Grace is now wanted for participation in a bank robbery. Everyone agrees that she must be innocent, since at the time the robbery took place, she was doing chores for the townspeople every day.Nevertheless, Tom argues that because of the increased risk to the town now that they are harboring someone who is wanted as a criminal, Grace should provide a quid pro quo and do more chores for the townspeople within the same time, for less pay. At this point, what was previously a voluntary arrangement takes on a slightly coercive nature as Grace is clearly uncomfortable with the idea. Still, being very amenable and wanting to please Tom, Grace agrees.At this point the situation worsens, as with her additional workload, Grace inevitably makes mistakes, and the people she works for seem to be equally irritated by the new schedule and take it out on Grace. The situation slowly escalates, with the male citizens making small sexual advances to Grace and the female ones becoming increasingly abusive. Even the children are perverse: Jason (Miles Purinton), the perhaps 10-year-old son of Chuck and Vera, asks Grace to spank him, until she finally complies after much provocation. Soon thereafter Chuck returns home and rapes Grace, as it becomes obvious that she is hardly able to defend herself against exploitation.After Tom discusses the possibility of escape with her, Grace is blamed by Vera both for spanking Jason and for being raped by Chuck. In revenge, Vera threatens Grace with destroying the porcelain figurines created by the town shop that she had acquired with the little wages she was given, Grace begs for mercy, reminding Vera of how she taught her children about stoicism. In response, Vera challenges Grace to stand up without shedding a tear while she destroys the first two of the porcelain figurines. Grace not being able to hold her tears, Vera destroys the remaining figurines. The symbol of her belonging in the town gone, she now knows that she must leave. With the help of Tom and Ben, the freight driver, she attempts escape in his apple truck, only to find herself raped by Ben and then returned to the town.The town agrees that they must not let her escape again. The money that she used to pay Ben had been taken by Tom from his father, and Grace is blamed for the theft. Tom refuses to come forward because, he explains, this is the only way he can still protect Grace without people getting suspicious. At this point, Grace's status as slave is finally confirmed as she is collared and chained to a large iron wheel which she must carry around with her, too heavy to allow her to move anywhere outside the town. More humiliatingly still, a bell is attached to her collar and announces her presence wherever she goes. Tom is the only male citizen of the town that does not rape her.This culminates in a late night general assembly in which Grace following Tom's suggestion relates calmly all that she has endured from everyone in town. Embarrassed and in complete denial, the townspeople finally decide to get rid of her. When Tom informs Grace to console her, he attempts to make love to her, having been the only adult male townperson who hasn't had sex with her. Grace, however, refuses to have sex with him. Angry partly at Grace's rejection, but even more at himself for his realization that he would eventually stoop to force himself upon her like everyone else in the town, Tom ends up personally calling the mobsters, and later proposes to unanimous approval that she be locked up in her shack.When the mobsters finally arrive, they are welcomed cordially by Tom and an impromptu committee of other townspeople. Grace is then freed and we finally learn who she really is: the daughter of a powerful gang leader who ran away because she could not stand her father's dirty work. Her father confronts her in his big limousine and tells her that she is arrogant for not holding others to the same high standards to which she holds herself. At first she refuses to listen, but as she looks again upon the town and its people, she is compelled to agree: she would have to condemn them to the worst possible punishment if she held them to her own standards, and it would be inhumane not to do so.So she accepts to be again her father's daughter, and immediately demands that the whole town be eliminated. In particular, she gives the order to have Vera look on at the murder of each of her children, having been told that it would stop if she can hold back her tears. The film ends in a crescendo of violence: the town is burned and all its citizens are brutally murdered by the gangsters on direct order from Grace, with the exception of Tom, whom she kills personally with a revolver. As the ashes of Dogville smolder around her, she finds and spares the only surviving resident, Moses the Dogville dog. Ironically, the only "dog" that hasn't wronged her was the town dog that had disappeared while the town was revealing its true nature.(Source: WikiPedia, Bangs_McCoy)

Tags: comedy, dark, depressing, murder, boring, allegory, cult, dramatic, psychedelic, philosophical, romantic, melodrama, revenge, sadist

Review:
And if they still don't believe, they are just like the people in this movie - unwilling to see the truth and coming up with excuses and reasons when nothing justifies the horrible world we live in.A true masterpiece - one of the few pure pieces of art in cinema with amazing acting from Nicole Kidman especially, and the lack of a set causes you to be immersed in the characters like no other movie.
Despite that there are no weak links, the acting is superb and it certainly appears as if von Trier's aim of stripping the film away to focus on performances has paid off in a big way.
I'm glad I stuck with him, though, because he really took it somewhere and I came away really enjoying the experience..Critics who hated Dogville talk about it's hamhanded anti-American slant (Lars von Trier refuses ever to set foot in that country).
Where on this planet can you NOT find a group of people who think:THE WORLD WOULD BE A BETTER PLACE IF EVERYONE WAS JUST LIKE US.That statement is the kernel of failure for every major conqueror and every major religion in history and it portends the long, inevitable swirl down the toilet and the people who want you toppled have only to sit back and watch you do it to yourself.America is a great nation, with a lot of culture, history and art to be proud of, and maybe that's why modern artists feel the need to make pieces like Dogville.
It seems I've been flooded with Kidman movies regularly for a couple weeks now and this is my favourite of her performances.Good film, Dogville..
All I knew was that "Dogville" had Nicole Kidman in it- an actress I have always liked- and Lars von Trier, a director I have always respected.
Or an autobiographical description of Von Trier's life?Dogville, made as a staged play and inspired by the song Pirate Jenny by Bertolt Brecht, is all, making not the structure of the tale set in a Colorado mining town complex, but its interpretation.
Like in Breaking the Waves, Von Trier uses the literature reference, dividing the movie in chapters to tell his tale of an individual becoming victim of group behavior, this time combined with the idealist / intellectual standing by and having no solutions on offer.
The end credits with the pictures give way to interpretations of the lack of a proper welfare state in the US, at least at the time of the Depression.Another moral issue arises in the most important dialog in the movie between Grace and her father.
So in reality Von Trier sees himself in the role of Tom. And he makes a deliberate parody of himself, because the harsh and demanding way he treats actresses is in a way comparable to the treatment of Grace.Technically the movie is well shot with the camera-work of Anthony Dod Mantle.
This film is a direct attack on the character at the centre of the American society - small town America.There is no good in von Trier's America.
Soon, everyone in the town sees Grace as a target of some sort of abuse but there's one little secret that they don't know about the mysterious Grace.Dogville like the director's previous films will be one that people either love or hate.Throughout the three hour running time I really wasn't sure where I stood because like Grace trying to figure out the town and discover who these people our, I as a viewer was trying to figure out what was the point of the film only to see its truth near the end at the same time as Grace makes her final decision.
This is a very complicated film and a film that requires a lot of thought and imagination from the viewer but in the end I couldn't help but feel that I had just seen something very special and unlike anything I had seen before.The first shot of the movie is one looking down on the town, which sets us up for what we're in for.
At first this is a very distracting thing to get used to but I suppose the director did this for a purpose and that was to make us learn these people and this town the same way Grace does.As her character begins to settle in and see the town more clearly then the viewer starts to not notice that characters are walking through doors that aren't there and that the houses are simply marked off in chalk.The biggest thing the film has going for it is Nicole Kidman who once again proves she's the best actress out there.
Grace (Kidman) embarks on small suburban town Dogville and although seemingly normal to the town's residents, the viewer is watching these people subsist in houses not too dissimilarly at all, to that of a Cluedo board in that their foundations are chalked out like corpses at crime scenes yet lacking the customary four walls.
Though initially hard for the eyes to get used to, after watching the film for its three hour duration you'll think all towns look like this.
I am particularly inclined to believe that he had in mind Ezekiel 16.49 when he wrote the script, given that the message is so similar.If it were the case that von Trier did have the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in mind when he wrote "Dogville," then it would seem that the characters of Grace and her father take on a quite interesting meaning.
I would say it was beautiful as well, and while it did have some beautifully rendered scenes, there was a whole lot of ugliness in the film to really be described in this way.Dogville is different than any movie I have ever seen.
Lars Von Trier, an interesting director without question with some very good films under his belt, decided to make a movie like a play, or something like that.
As with his previous film, the austere musical-fable Dancer in the Dark, Dogville looks at the workings of an American society through the eyes of a naïve, trusting and somewhat martyr-like outsider.
From this rough thematic assessment - coupled with the use of John Hurt's sombre, storybook-style narration, and the exploitative humiliation central to the plot - many have chosen to view Dogville as a political allegory, which looks specifically at the unfair manipulation, abuse, betrayal and degradation heaped upon the outsider by the American people, who are here portrayed as highly intellectual, multi-dimensional characters, stricken and simplified by the feelings of fear, paranoia, hatred and xenophobia.
However, although this social interpretation is partly true, the nature of the film, not least, the overall message, is more in tune with the issues of personal betrayal, human morality (or, in some instances, immorality) and personal retribution, which gives the film a more universal aspect that goes beyond the rather offensive and simplistic idea of European, anti-American propaganda.The central ideology behind the story - that being, the corruption of the human spirit and man's capacity for evil in the face of greed and retribution - coupled with von Trier's stark visual design, hints that the story could really take place in any small town in any country of the world; which, to an extent, is completely true.
Although the iconography of Dogville (the golden sunlight, the "implied" mountainous landscapes, the stars and stripes, the Model-T Fords, the Thompson machine-guns, Elm Street - the site of the Kennedy assassination - and that closing photo-montage of U.S. devastation) would suggest that von Trier is attempting to create a vision of bleak Americana, his approach to the film (an international cast, no real sets, no exterior filming, etc) instead demonstrates that he is also interested in creating a kind of anonymity; shrouding Dogville in a cloak of obscure theatricality, to not only simplify the process of film-making (to get to the root of the drama and the truth of the performance, as he had done with Breaking the Waves and the Idiots), but to also simplify the underlining sub-text of the plot.The visual aesthetic of the films sees much of the action take place on a blackened sound-stage, with all the shops, houses and street names represented in chalk outlines etched onto the floor.
For me, the most impressive thing about the film's design was von Trier's idea to have every member of the cast on stage at all times, which gives the film a much darker feeling of conspiratorial foreboding, as we witness the abuse, degradation and numerous physical assaults against our protagonist Grace alongside the townsfolk, who, despairingly enough, turn their backs as if nothing has happened.
Unlike the townsfolk of Dogville however, we, as an audience, are forced to watch as the film spirals towards the same kind of bleak melodrama present in von Trier's last three films (and also his earlier TV film, Medea), as the director keeps his probing hand-held cameras right up close to the action, to document the town's downfall in all it's agonising, unflinching, naturalistic despair.As a result of this, Dogville can be a particularly difficult film to watch, falling into the same category as films like Cries & Whispers, A Short Film About Killing, Dead Man's Shoes and von Trier's own Dancer in the Dark, by continually hitting us with scene after scene of utter emotional despair, that can only ever lead to the bleakest of bleak, emotionally devastating dénouements.
in which von Trier subverts the entire meaning of the film with one of the most shocking and thought-provoking explosions of real aggression that we've ever seen (whilst also proving himself - once again - to be one of the most talented and provocative world filmmakers currently at work).
It's certainly not a film that you could call entertaining, with the film leaving you with a number of upsetting thoughts and questions that will linger for many days after your initial viewing, with von Trier succeeding in the creation of the bleakest, most confrontational portrayal of humanity ever before seen.Naturally, from this, the film will appeal to viewers looking for a powerful cinematic experience; though, personally, I think it's one of those films that should be experienced by as many people as possible.
Actors can be lured into anything -no matter how ridiculous or humiliating this anything might be- provided their agents tell this anything is "artistic".Since Europa (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101829/), a very interesting movie, Lars Von Triers started his steep decline, after Dogville he actually stopped it: he reached the very bottom.By the by, who this moralist wanna-be does he think he is to equal the anonymous people in the pictures on the ending titles with the bunch of slobbering mangy poachers inhabiting the Dogville in his head.One of the most important characteristics of America is her tolerance to criticism, as far as I know there is no other society willing to pay to be vilified and even to praise the vilifier.Just to conclude, this endeavor -the utterance of implacable moral criticism toward certain American issues- can be found in the fiction of Theodore Dreisser, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Carson Mc Cullers, H.L. Mencken who are all American writers by the way.The difference between them and Mr. Von Triers, is a crystal-clear one: they were not mere show-offs desperately trying to judge what they thoroughly ignored; quite on the contrary, they were poets (some better than others) trying to find a truth and express it as a thing of beauty.The idea of poor people portrayed as vile is thoroughly fascist.This movie reminds me the nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels who used to say: "tell the biggest lie you can and repeat it often and eventually people will believe it".
The final hour of the film has much of the feel of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," as Grace becomes the expiatory sacrifice for the sinful folk who live in the town - until, that is, the tables are turned on them.Because the story is essentially a morality play and a parable, Von Trier has chosen to make the film on a stark sound stage, with chalk lines substituting for walls and only the barest minimum of décor suggesting an actual town.
The tone of self-importance that permeates the film is reflected in the dividing up of the tale into nine "chapters" - replete with fancy title cards - and the use of a droning, hoity-toity narrator (more shades of "Our Town") whose main function seems to be to point out the obvious.As Grace, Nicole Kidman does an effective job portraying an essentially passive victim, although we spend most of our time wanting to see her deck all those sadistic idiots with whom she comes into daily contact.
Once things began to turn sour between Grace and the residents of Dogville, I started enjoying the film more, and I actually loved the ending.
It's as engaging as two hours of hearing about Joe Average's typical day on the job as an accountant, or at a bottlecap factory, only we have to hear about it with that poor, humorless approximation of the 19th Century literary style, largely from a narrator, and with nearly everyone reciting lines as if they're 11 year olds trying to read Heidegger out loud.As is made all too obvious by the ending credits, von Trier intends the film as somewhat of a scathing "satire" of America, seen through the eyes of small town life.
Look, everyone is entitled to their own opinion of whether or not this is a good movie......but anyone who doesn't realize that LARS VON TRIER is an anti-American, American bashing jerk is simply uninformed.
This is a grueling and brutal film, superbly written, performed, and directed.Lars Von Treir is the master of making you question why the hell you are wasting your time watching one of h...(read more)is movies, until the closing minutes, when things don't so much as "twist" as come to a head, the films real message, real emotional peak is finally reached, giving the rest of the film, a new light to stand in.The satire of American culture , and human nature in general, is as contentious and ingenious as any committed to celluloid or print.
Yes, the acting was quite good, but to sit through three hours of what essentially was a stage production on camera with very little storyline progression, I was screaming at the television by the time it was done, especially given how it ended.It felt like an art movie for the sake of being artistic, rather than really attempting to communicate something.
Dogville is a plodding and pretentious allegory with a clear nihilistic message which can also be discerned in "Dancer in the Dark" (the other film I've seen by Lars von Trier).
Dogville, although it almost lost my (MTV/ADD) interest in the very beginning due to the lack of anything, focuses less on aesthetic externalities and keys in on using the true batter that any good movie is made from and that is equal parts great story, superb acting, and an ending that summons the audience to take a moment and absorb.
Nicole Kidman played the best role of her career and I have to admit that waiting for so long to see her in this performance was worth it.With all this said I couldn't accept Lars von Trier's Dogville as his masterpiece.
Well-known actors and actresses are so deglamorized as to be virtually unrecognizable, so that it is a shocking surprise when we finally realize who they are.The film is set in Depression-era rural America, but it transcends that specific time and place to become a microcosm for humanity as a whole.The final half-hour of "Dogville" kept me on the edge of my seat, trying to figure out the message of the film -- and, just when I thought I had got von Trier's drift, he did a U-turn and stood my interpretation on its head.But I think I can say, without overstating the case, that "Dogville" is a morality play -- more than that, a theological reflection, albeit of a very dark and pessimistic nature.
I finally saw von Trier's DOGVILLE and think it is one of the most original and powerful films of the past ten years.
"Dogville" dawdles at times, and it is especially difficult to avoid clock-watching after the second hour, but impressive is the way that von Trier manages to pull off a film so stylistically eyebrow raising.
Thought-provoking and thoroughly one-of-a-kind, this is a film you won't be forgetting any time soon.Set during The Great Depression, "Dogville" follows Grace (Nicole Kidman), a woman on the run from gangsters.
Nicole Kidman stars in this extraordinary film as Grace, a woman on the run from mobsters, who is taken in by the residents of a small and isolated town called Dogville.
The action takes place within this "stage" and there is nothing else to be seen.In this environment, the 16 main characters that constitute the movie (excluding some occasional outsiders such as policemen and gangsters), i.e. the fugitive Grace (Nicol Kidman) and the Dogville residents, are portrayed in an extremely powerful way; indeed, the absence of the usual constituents of a film (scenes, visual effects, etc.) magnifies each personality and his/her interactions with Grace.
"Dogville" is a movie that has created a lot of controversy due to its supposed "anti-American" message; nevertheless, the work of director Lars Von Trier transcends nationalities and, intentional or not, its powerful message is a social critic to the very human nature.
While this may sound like a very hard task to do, it actually works superbly because the nature of the story is not in the visuals, but in the actions, and the same way we can see through the walls of "Dogville", we can see through the characters, and we witness something we wouldn't like to know about them.The movie is a very interesting study on morality, and it works on many levels; starting with the first scene, is Grace really innocent?