Manderlay (2005)

Traveling across America with her father (Willem Dafoe), Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) comes to discover the isolated plantation of Manderlay – a place whose inhabitants do not know that slavery has been abolished. Outraged to discover that the plantations

Von Trier takes on slavery

For anyone who has seen "Dogville" it is a natural progression to see "Manderlay", part 2 of the American trilogy by the famously difficult to work with director Lars Von Trier. I personally like his films because the center of the story is inevitable a woman: strong, independent if not naive. In this film we come actross the plantation where black inhabitants are still enslaved despite the fact that slavory was abolished 70 years ago. Our main character Grace takes it upon herself to free them and teach them how to become (economically) self-sufficient. As much as Von Trier's critics were complaining about this work that they claimed was racially charged adn anti-american, when one thinks about it, Von Trier simply wanted to make it quite human. We learn that regardless of racial characteristics, people are people and they can be categorized into seven types. Film is actually psychological profiling that explains that it is our innate psyche that makes us what we are, who we are and how we see ourselves - not race, color or class. Definitely a powerfuil message but film still gets only four start. I do not understand why such gifted visual storyteller like Von Trier would resourt on making a film that looks as if it is made on the ordinary theatre stage with minimal props. If you have seen his beautiful film "Medea" that is so visually rich, you would know what I am talking about. Still, this is one of those directors that should not be ignored. February 4, 2008

Not as good as "Dogville"...

Man, I was so disappointed in this film. "Dogville" is one of the most powerful and moving experiences that I have ever had in a theatre before, and they had to follow it up with this, "Manderlay", starring Bryce Dallas Howard as Grace, who was originally played to perfection by Nicole Kidman. Bryce Dallas, while I loved her in "The Village", doesn't seem to know what to do with this role. She seems lost, and she's the main character, and everything rests on her performace.

As with "Dogville", von Treir has taken the minimalist approach again, and we have the sporadically decorated, but otherwise bare, soundstage where all of the action takes place. It worked in the first installment of this supposed "trilogy", but here it all looks cramped and thrown together. The acting is sub-par, the narration is long winded, and could be considered slightly offensive to some, and it is just lacking in every way. Don't get me wrong, there are some powerful moments here. However, there is just nothing to ponder after the credits have rolled. It's like sitting through a big, long sermon with a pastor who doesn't know the source material that well. Eventually, you just find yourself tuning it out...

Recommended with reservations... December 30, 2007

Would you agree.... ?

Beginning last night, and passing into this day, I watched "Dogville" and its' sequel, "Manderlay." I was hoping for something along the lines of Claude Berri's "Germinal" by way of John Sayles' "Matewan."

Given:

1. that "Dogville" suffers terribly from its' slow pace,

2. that any sense of continuity between the two films suffers terribly from the loss of Kidman (replaced by a very limited Bryce Dallas Howard) and Caan (who was replaced by Willem Dafoe).

2. Von Trier's (and his teams') obvious ability as a director, as evinced by the power of their "Breaking the Waves," and other films ...

... Would you agree ...

3. That Von Trier's treatment of his socio-politcal themes (forgiveness and compassion have limits, ultimately power, even dignity, comes from the barrel of a gun, the unexpected outcomes of attempts at social engineering abroad) are pointed, Bergman-bleak and have some validity as critiques of American's bungling and costly efforts to influence events abroad?

4. That it's a goddamn shame Von Trier hadn't decided to drop his theatrical conceit (of adapting the modernist staging of Thorton Wilder's "Our Town") and chosen to shoot these scripts more naturalistically (like Terrance Malick's "Days of Heaven") ? The theatricality of the staging limited the effectiveness of the storytelling medium in both films. These scripts are solid agitprop, and would've made for some solid, if didactic, even operatic, visceral filmmaking. They would have made Von Trier the next Costa-Gravis.

6. That - as it stands - we'll likely never see the third part of the trilogy realized on film?

7. And finally, that I can be a terribly pretentious sod? November 24, 2007

Terrible, Slow and Just a little Bit Racist

As the song from Avenue Q goes, everyone's a little bit racist, and that definitely applies to Lars Von Trier who takes a convoluted story about a plantation and a well-meaning white woman with her jones on for black dudes and hits America over the head with a sermon about how America should just leave well enough alone. Bryce Dallas Howard plays the white woman who forcibly frees plantation slaves only to discover that all of her well-meaning plans go awry. The plantation slaves are the typical shuck and jive "massa always knew best" types that post-Civil Rights Hollywood directors would blush at.

Worse than the implicit racism running through the movie, there's a smug, satisfied narration that makes the whole thing that much more tedious. As with Arthur Miller, Lars Von Trier is one of those directors who thinks that he must tell the audience what to think. And as usual, the audience ends up thinking "I wonder if there's anything else to watch."

Tired, boring, self-satisfied and racist - I suppose it plays well at Cannes. July 12, 2007

Politically confused, but intellectually stimulating film

The third effort by Lars Von Trier to explore the dark underbelly of America (after Dancer in the Dark and Dogville; a fourth effort is reportedly in the making) is politically confused, quite ludicrous, and it sometimes veer into very dangerous territory for a "progressive" intellectual like Von Trier. Yet, it is nevertheless a well performed and very intellectually stimulating movie. Deliberately stagy, Dogville is set in 1933, where slavery persists (!) in a farm called Manderlay in Alabama. After finding about Manderlay, our heroine Grace (Dallas Bryce Howard, the daughter of Ron Howard, in a very risky role) decides to stay in Manderlay for a few months in order to give notions of democracy to the slaves and to the white masters. Unfortunately, things go wrong because the blacks have been conditioned to servitude and the whites intend to keep them that way. The movie at times endorses a crude Stalinist view of America, and at other times reach the seeming (and astonishing) conclusion that African Americans are unable to govern themselves. Yet for all its flaws and contradictions, this is very much a movie that deserves to bee seen by those with an open mind. March 31, 2007

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