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Manderlay (2005)

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From Time Out London

Listen up all you masochists, enlightened anti-Americans and those with a fetish for Lars von Trier’s Brechtian minimalism: the second part of the Danish provocateur’s American trilogy has arrived and it’s an imperialist action-movie starring The Rock and Scarlett Johansson.

Only teasing… it’s business as usual for Von Trier as the filmmaker with a fear of travel once again adopts the same bare sound-stage and ensemble-cast that he employed in ‘Dogville’ to pick like a vulture at the bones of American history. Slavery – then and now – is his focus here, which allows the director of ‘The Idiots’ and ‘Dancer in the Dark’ to question the very foundation of America’s social contract with its minorities. It also allows him, of course, to prod impishly at his audience’s liberal tendencies.

Von Trier is both a thinker and an aggressor. He’s a filmmaker who has been shaped increasingly by his experiences at the barricades of international film festivals and by fraught run-ins with American critics. These two Von Triers are in evidence here, and the duality is tiring. It’s no wonder that the director has announced that he is scaling back his operations and will premiere his next film (a Dogme comedy) in Copenhagen, not Cannes. The attack-dogs, one feels, now have him in a tight corner.

Still, Von Trier has lost none of his ability to excite and bore in equal measure as he resurrects the character of Grace (played by Bryce Dallas Howard this time, not Nicole Kidman). It’s the 1930s, and Grace, accompanied by her gangster father (Willem Dafoe), stumbles across an extant slave community, Manderlay, run by a dying madam (Lauren Bacall). Horrified by this, and once the madam dies, Grace decides to use her power to free and ‘help’ these former slaves. Accompanied by her father’s armed henchmen, she introduces her own form of democracy to Manderlay, which, predictably, allows for a new perverse society to emerge. Ultimately, Grace’s liberal motivations become corrupt. The slaves decide that they preferred the old days. At least slavery kept them warm and fed.

Some critics have interpreted this turn in the story as Von Trier saying – perversely – that slavery is better for his characters than freedom ever was. Such an accusation is unfair and simplistic. Von Trier is questioning the imposition of ‘freedom’ from above, while at the same time riffing on uncomfortable ideas relating to white guilt and motivation. Freedom, Von Trier suggests, is not an absolute but rather a loose principle that should be adapted to the needs of a community. The nod towards America’s current project in the Middle East is clear.

Like both ‘Dogville’ and Von Trier’s script for Thomas Vinterberg’s ‘Dear Wendy’, ‘Manderlay’ is steeped in ideas relating to America’s history but also to state-building more generally. America is simply the canvas that Von Trier chooses – which makes sense when you consider that ‘America’ is as much an ideal, a blueprint and a world-recognised political model as it is an actual place. Who cares whether Von Trier has ever been to America, as some critics carp at him? Von Trier’s approach, like that of a political philosopher, is to strip a community to its bare bones, take it back to its inception, and build it from there, witnessing the corruption of power and ideals along the way. America suits this purpose well enough. Portugal wouldn’t have the same effect.

Ultimately, ‘Manderlay’ can be compared to an afternoon ploughing through the more obscure regions of the Old Testament or any work of political philosophy; admittedly a rare or foreign pastime for most of us. Watching this film is an edifying but frustrating experience; dull in parts, amusing and illuminating in others. You’d still struggle to call it entertainment. Its thrills come in patches; its duller moments feel much longer.

If only the entire film was as stimulating as the end-credits, during which, like at the close of ‘Dogville’, the soundtrack booms to David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ as images flash up one-by-one relating to slavery, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the Iraq wars, the Rodney King beatings and more besides. He’s a rigorous clown, that Von Trier, but the yawns outweigh the laughs.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London Issue 1854: March 1-8 2006

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