Lars von Trier's Dogville gives us America on a soundstage and a Rocky Mountain township rendered in chalk marks on the floor. It is Von Trier's America and Von Trier's township, and this enraged some viewers who dismissed the film as a crude, blinkered diatribe from a man too timid (on account of his aversion to air travel) to actually visit the country for himself. And yes, Dogville is crude and arguably blinkered as well. But it is also electrifying, gripping and audacious: the work of a director at the peak of his powers.
Nicole Kidman stars as Grace, a peroxide Jesus on the run from a band of Depression-era gangsters, who takes refuge with "the good, honest folk of Dogville". Her chief protector is Tom – a wide-eyed, aspiring writer who Paul Bettany elects to play as a kind of malign riff on John-Boy Walton. In order to secure Grace's safety, Tom arranges for his guest to perform chores for the locals (Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara, Chloë Sevigny, etc) and this arrangement delights all concerned, because these Dogvillians are deeply enamoured of Grace. They'll eat her up, they love her so.
Von Trier has a reputation as the mercurial court jester of world cinema and what a bag of tricks he opens here. Taking its lead from Bertolt Brecht and the black box theatre, Dogville arranges its inhabitants in a vast, largely blank interior where front doors creak unseen and the gooseberry bushes are represented by a helpful caption ("gooseberry bushes!"). For five minutes this is a nagging distraction. Then the drama waves its wand and makes the gimmick disappear, so that we stop noticing Von Trier's formal conceit except on the deepest gut level, the one that really matters.
What follows is a film in which everything is visible except the technique. Von Trier leaves the actions of his characters deliberately exposed. He removes the props and the covers to expose a culture of cruelty that seems to be sustained by a willing blindness (at best) and an active complicity (at worst). I love Dogville, a tale of the 1930s that landed slap-bang in the middle of the "war on terror". Von Trier gives us a homespun spider's web; a poisoned slice of apple pie; his own version of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, repurposed for the Abu Ghraib generation.
