Manderlay - Palm Beach Post movie review

'Manderlay' is mercifully shorter than its predecessor

By HAP ERSTEIN
Palm Beach Post

The second shoe of Danish director Lars Von Trier's projected America trilogy has dropped and it is marginally better than the first, only because it is almost 40 minutes shorter.

IFC Films

'Manderlay'

The verdict: A Dogville sequel, every bit as simplistic and grating, just a little shorter.

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.

On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime

Following up his 2003 film Dogville, a pretentious political allegory with a simplistic take on the social history of the United States, is Manderlay, a similarly naive and grating tract on racism, exploitation and greed.

Manderlay picks up where Dogville ended, but — like a long-running soap opera — different actors are playing the few continuing characters. In 1933, well-meaning liberal Grace (formerly Nicole Kidman, now Bryce Dallas Howard) has left the Colorado town of Dogville and is driven by her gangster father (Willem Dafoe, taking over for James Caan) to rural Alabama.

There she finds a plantation full of slaves unaware of the Emancipation Proclamation and Grace suddenly senses a purpose to her life. She settles in Manderlay, frees the slaves and tutors them on the tenets of democracy and the nuances of the ballot box. Squint and you can sort of see parallels to the situation in Iraq, but with no more insight than Von Trier brings to his other themes.

Like Dogville, Manderlay is filmed on a staunchly artificial sound stage set, with locations indicated by painted lines and labels. This focuses our attention on the dialogue, a strategy that is not to Von Trier's advantage.

The cast also includes Lauren Bacall and Danny Glover, but only Howard has a role of any size or significance. That she emerges from this exercise as well as she does can only mean her career is now on an upswing.