To say that the film ends in violence is not to give away the ending so much as to wonder how else it could have ended. They talk in monotones, they seem to be reciting truisms rather than speaking spontaneously, they seem to sense the film's inevitable end. The actors (or maybe it's the characters) seem to be in a kind of trance much of the time. Without stepping too far out on a limb, however, I doubt that we have any villages where the helpless visitor would eventually be chained to a bed and raped by every man in town. It's a big country, and it has a lot of different kinds of people. All of these things are true, and all of these things are untrue. What von Trier is determined to show is that Americans are not friendly, we are suspicious of outsiders, we cave in to authority, we are inherently violent, etc. There are assorted other citizens and various children, and James Caan turns up at the end in a long black limousine. Tom's dad is the town doctor ( Philip Baker Hall) Stellan Skarsgard grows apples and, crucially, owns a truck Patricia Clarkson is his wife Ben Gazzara is the all-seeing blind man Lauren Bacall runs the general store Bill Raymond and Blair Brown are the parents of Jeremy Davies and Chloe Sevigny. Grace meets the townspeople, played by such a large cast of stars that we suspect the original running time must have been even longer than 177 minutes. She is greeted by Tom Edison ( Paul Bettany), an earnest young man, who persuades his neighbors to give her a two-week trial run before deciding whether to allow her to stay in town. She plays a young woman named Grace who arrives in Dogville being pursued by gangsters (who here, as in Brecht, I fear represent native American fascism). ![]() The movie stars Nicole Kidman in a rather brave performance: Like all the actors, she has to act within a narrow range of tone, in an allegory that has no reference to realism. When the film premiered at Cannes 2003, he was accused of not portraying Americans accurately, but how many movies do? Anything by David Spade come to mind? Von Trier could justifiably make a fantasy about America, even an anti-American fantasy, and produce a good film, but here he approaches the ideological subtlety of a raving prophet on a street corner. His dislike of the United States (which he has never visited, since he is afraid of airplanes) is so palpable that it flies beyond criticism into the realm of derangement. The idea reminds us of "Our Town," but von Trier's version could be titled "Our Hell." In his town, which I fear works as a parable of America, the citizens are xenophobic, vindictive, jealous, suspicious and capable of rape and murder.
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