Last night, we dreamt of
Manderlay
again...
Lars von Trier is unbelievably gutsy.
The same reviewers who once wet themselves over
Breaking the Waves
and
Dancer in the Dark
unabashedly loathe his latest film. Even Roger Ebert concludes his
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review defensively: "No doubt if everyone in America had always been Danish, we could have avoided some of our sins." Yankee critics in general have done everything but stick their fingers in their ears and waggle them, though there was grudging admiration for
Dogville
, the first installment of von Trier's America-themed trilogy. But what's not to love; the so-called "Brechtian" sets with their attendantly weird mise en scène, the A-list actors, the Tolstoyan narration? Can it be that a generation of infamously left-leaning critics have rediscovered patriotism? Are they rightly decrying von Trier's racism?
Fortunately, mere reviewers only have to advise you as to whether a film raises such questions intelligently and/or is entertaining enough to warrant an hour's worth of your living wage.
Manderlay
? Absolutely. It's engrossing, discomfiting, elegant, hostile, at times otiose and at others darkly funny; it's possibly like nothing you've seen before and it's seemingly fearless. Fleeing
Dogville
and its bloody conclusion are Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) and her father (Willem Dafoe). They stop at Manderlay, a plantation run by the rapidly declining "Mam" (Lauren Bacall), where Grace learns that the African-Americans who work the cotton fields still think they're slaves. Living behind wrought iron bars, unaware that they "were freed 70 years ago," the discovery rouses Grace's idealism, and she decides to remain behind and provide a transitional government for the community. Predictably, her benevolent despotism turns ugly fast, as she's confronted at every turn by the blatancy of her own bigotry, juxtaposed with her ego-bound desire to prove unprejudiced and useful. She has a seeming ally in elderly house servant Wilhelm (Danny Glover), who's the one best
versed in "Mam's Law," an occult system of personality type and Byzantine regulation to which the ersatz slaves still refer reverently. Perhaps worst of all, she's increasingly attracted to Timothy (Isaach
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De Bankolé), romanticizing him to the point of caricature and worse-with inevitable and inevitably tragic results.
There's more than enough here to sink your interpretive teeth into: the obvious reference to Du Maurier, Hitchcock and Kipling, the chapter titles (Bergman), the pointedly endless narration (John Hurt provides the omniscient voiceover, the pinnacle of credibility) and the baroque string quartet accompanying most scenes; even the
lighting
bespeaks relationship. There's nothing accidental in any of the carefully controlled performances, and very little that's not so thickly plastered with irony that it effectively becomes its opposite.
To claim that von Trier cannot comment on US history because he's never visited America is fatuous and facile. Is this where identity politics have left us, stranded in a terminally earnest world where no narrative subversion is possible, where the sins of characters are attributed to their creator? If anything von Trier has gone overboard, almost outdoing Spike Lee, with strokes so broad that he can't possibly be mistaken as endorsing his film's misanthropic choices. Bravo to him, anyway, for pointing the full force of European dramatic tradition at the heart of the hegemonic beast, with a novelistic layering of detail cruel in its unhesitating certainty.
When Grace makes a condescending display of giving her paints and easel away to an artistic lad-and then, beaming, hands them to the wrong young man-the strength of your reflexive flinch takes the measure of von Trier's success.
