Manderlay - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution movie review

No one emerges unscathed in 'Manderlay'

By BOB LONGINO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Manderlay," the less successful but certainly as interesting follow-up to Lars von Trier's dynamite "Dogville," isn't necessarily going to win too many friends in America.

Like "Dogville," this latest installment in Von Trier's inventive and, some would say, hateful look at these United States doesn't exhibit much kindness in dissecting the issue of slavery. It's a harsh look at who we are, what we've been about and what kind of people we might really be.

IFC Films

'Manderlay'

The verdict: Less successful than "Dogville," but Von Trier's scathing view of slavery in America is unsettling and thought-provoking.

Director: Lars von Trier
Starring: Bryce Dallas Howard, Willem Dafoe, Jeremy Davies, Danny Glover, Udo Kier, Jean-Marc Barr
Run time: 139 minutes
Release date: Jan. 27, 2006
Rating: Not rated, but includes profanity, nudity, violent images and sex.

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"Manderlay" is exploitative and further proof, some claim, that the director disdains women. (Ron Howard's daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard, who stars in the film, disrobes and performs a sex scene that will likely make her father's jaw drop). The film's also vicious.

Nobody emerges fully unscathed, no matter their color. Ideology, either. Von Trier sets fire to democracy as easily as he chastises our personifications of what it means to be a part of the land of the free.

The film opens where the 1930s era "Dogville" concludes, with the former runaway Grace and her gangster father exiting Colorado after torching the small town of Dogville, and heading toward Alabama.

Nicole Kidman and James Caan, who so readily machine-gunned the not-so-fair citizens of Dogville into oblivion, have been replaced in this film by Howard and Willem Dafoe.

If the latter two don't exactly act as their characters might considering their actions in the first film, it hardly matters. A Von Trier film has never been too concerned with continuity.

Like "Dogville," "Manderlay" is a Brechtian film/play performed on a large stage with a few basic props, portions of doors and walls, and lettered names on the floor representing gardens or fields. The staging was more integral in the original film; here, it feels more like an obligation to continue the effects.

There's a roving camera — and though in "Dogville" that camera seemed to poke its nose into various conversations, here there is a much stronger point of view.

That view is, obviously, the director's take on the development and aftermath of slavery in America. This not a singular indictment of the South, but an indictment of the entire cultural and social fabric of the New World.

Here, Grace and her father discover a plantation that, 70 years after the Civil War, has been holding on to old ways. With the death of the plantation's owner (Lauren Bacall, who had a different role in the first film), Grace tries to instill freedom and democracy among the whites and blacks who remain, with mixed results.

The reaction from critics has been mixed, too. Esteemed film writers such as the Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer Prize-winning Joe Morgenstern have been quite harsh. Entertainment Weekly said Von Trier is a "taxidermist of American sins, but the way he puts those sins on display only to thumb his nose at them marks him as a new style of prankster-hypocrite."

To be honest, though, Von Trier doesn't treat this subject any differently than he does in any film he's ever made.

Brain twists are his forte, and "Manderlay" succeeds in thoroughly lashing both the ultraconservative and most liberal views regarding slavery.

Von Trier may not be completely right. But he certainly isn't all wrong.

The snarling canine of "Dogville" is physically gone, but, as always, Von Trier successfully shows how a dog's bite can certainly be worse than its bark.