Back into the world of Von Trier, here we have a film with a very interesting presentational style, but also one where I’m conflicted on how I feel about it. It’s funny, I remember seeing a lot of people take issue with Dancer in the Dark while I found it to be pretty well done overall. With this film, I’m starting to share some of their sentiments, though in a different way than they do, I think. Hopefully, I can describe what I mean well enough, but it might be difficult to pin down my exact feelings here. Well, first off, I’ll tell you about the story.
The film takes place in the thirties and is set within the titular town of Dogville, a small remote town cut off from the rest of the county. There’s only one road in or out and almost no one ever moves in or out either. In the early part of the film, we follow Thomas Edison Jr, son of Thomas Edison Sr, neither of whom is the famous Thomas Edison. Instead, Senior is a doctor who’s getting on in the years while Junior is a wannabe writer and philosopher, trying to maintain some sort of moral center in the town through regular meetings, though he comes across as rather pretentious a lot of the time. His, and everyone’s lives, are suddenly shaken up by the arrival of Grace, a woman on the run from the mob for an undisclosed reason. Tom runs into her as she’s trying to climb up the mountain, and suggests that she hide in the old abandoned mine. He manages to get the gangsters away from the town, though they give him a card with their number in case he sees her. Tom manages to convince the townsfolk at the next meeting to allow Grace to live with them, though many are skeptical of this arrangement. At first, Grace tries to offer her services to anyone that needs it, but no one seems to need anything done. So, she starts asking folks if there’s anything they don’t need done, and little by little, she builds up a good rapport with the citizens. Eventually, they accept her as one of their own, even letting her join them at Thanksgiving dinner. However, as the reward money for her ramps up, noted by the new wanted sign that the county sheriff came to post in town, the Dogville-ites start to think that maybe Grace owes them more than she’s been giving. After all, it’s becoming more and more dangerous for them to keep her safe. As you can imagine, things go from bad to horrendous after that, but I’ll let you see it all for yourself. I will warn you that it gets very uncomfortable and disturbing, so I would definitely tread with caution and maybe avoid it all together if it’s too triggering. For now, though, we’ll move on to my review.
One thing that I definitely found interesting about this film was the production design. It basically looks like a black box theater play but shot cinematically. It all takes place on one set with incredibly sparse set elements. The buildings are mainly denoted by chalk outlines on the ground with names written on as identifiers, and the actors have to mime opening and closing doors. I thought this was a very fascinating choice, and while I don’t exactly know why it was chosen, I have a theory or two. It could be there to help illustrate the small-town nature of Dogville, a place where everyone knows everyone and nobody hides anything, an idea which gets torn down as the film goes on and the people show more and more their capacity for vileness. It could also be like that for a reason that I’ll get to a little later, because I need to explain a few things first. So, I would take this film’s central idea to be the conflict between whether or not some people are just awful and need to be “corrected,” or if no one can be truly awful at the core and that everyone deserves forgiveness. Given that the film and town’s name are “Dogville,” and given what the people do to Grace over the course of the film, you’ll probably have a good idea what side of the fence the film falls on by the end. Setting the film in the great depression is probably meant to add to this too, getting across the idea that just because you’re in a bad state in life right now, that doesn’t give you the right to do horrible things to others. While I think there might be slight nuance to this message, since the person who espouses the “correct the dogs” mentality is someone who uses people for his own gain (I’ll let you find out who he is), the film does still end on the note that this was ultimately the correct option (or at least that the townsfolk brought it upon themselves). Here’s where I started having some difficulty with this film. While I can recognize the central idea, I felt that the way the film went about proving it came across as almost contrived or something to that effect. The townsfolk treat Grace horribly after they “reconsider their situation” and put her through so much abuse, both mental and physical. The latter is especially disturbing, as several of the men in the town do horrid things to her, which I won’t describe but I think you can figure out what I mean. Even the men that seemed nice and helpful at first prove themselves to be just as self-serving as anyone else, and this includes Tom who, while not forcing himself upon Grace, does prove himself to be cowardly in the face of the town and unwilling to compromise his own interests for Grace’s well-being. Here’s the thing, many of the things that happen to Grace in this film are things that could happen to someone in real life, especially in an area as remote as Dogville (though sadly they can still happen in places that aren’t so remote). I also appreciated how the film showed how the townsfolk rationalized their cruelty to themselves and each other, something that is all too real a lot of the time. However, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I could see through the writing on all this. What I mean is that the story came across to me like the writer was more concerned with getting their message across, and so plunked in terrible events for the main character to go through just to get them from point A to point B. Basically, it felt more concerned with being didactic than with truly supporting the story, not unlike an edgy middle school kid who wants to prove to everyone how much humanity sucks or something. This is why I feel so conflicted about this film, because I want to like it and I want to believe that I might be looking at it wrong, but I can’t help but feel that it’s not as strong as it’s trying to be. I talked to a friend of mine about the film, and he compared it to a fairy-tale, which did change my perspective a little bit. I could see how it can be viewed that way, with the set resembling a play and John Hurt narrating the story as we go through the different chapters. It might very well be exactly what von Trier was going for, but even at that, I think it stopped short of working. Typically, fairy-tales, especially of the Little Red Riding Hood variety, were meant to teach lessons to people, often very harshly, since these were times where mortality rates were very high. However, Dogville doesn’t feel like it goes far enough with the “adult fairy-tale” idea for the audience to accept the somewhat contrived nature of the storytelling, or at least I wasn’t able to. It ultimately just seems to get stuck between old and new kinds of storytelling and ultimately isn’t quite effective at either. I realize now that I’m running out of time with this, so I’ll have to wrap things up here. The last thing to note before we close is that the cast in this film is very impressive. You not only get several well-known contemporary actors and actresses, but also many of the old guard that were in the later stage of their careers. Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara, James Caan, I was surprised to see them all here, so I have to give commendations for that at least.
Ultimately, I’m sad that I feel so down about this film. I really wanted to like it, but it just never reached that point where I could really go along with what it was doing. Maybe you’ll have better luck than me, though I’ll warn you again that there is some very harsh material in this film, so tread with caution. I’ll probably take a little break from von Trier for a while, I’ve covered him several times already and pretty close together, so look forward to whatever I have in store next. Until then, give Dogville a watch, but only with a cautious recommendation from me.