Dogville

Lars von Trier’s Dogville is a gruelling moral fable worth the effort for its actors and its stark staging, provided patience is part of the evening’s plan. Nicole Kidman’s Grace seeks refuge in a small American town, where accepting a stranger becomes a test of the neighbours’ decency. Von Trier writes and directs with a determination to examine every unpleasant implication of that arrangement. At 178 minutes, he also gives us ample time to grasp points he will insist on making again.

Production designer Peter Grant puts the town on a bare stage, which proves an effective way of making its inhabitants hard to ignore. The lack of scenery concentrates attention on the people and on the performance of being neighbourly. Anthony Dod Mantle’s intrusive camerawork prevents the theatrical setting from keeping us at a safe distance. The actors have to make this place credible without the usual help of convincing streets and houses. For much of the film, they manage it.

Kidman makes Grace’s need for shelter feel immediate, even when the script is busy using her to demonstrate the neighbours’ failings. We found her vulnerability upsetting: with so little scenery, there is no comfortable distraction from her dependence on the people around her. She gives us a reason to care about what happens to Grace before we have decided what to think about the town. That matters in a film whose writer seems so certain of his judgement. The supporting cast also make the artificial community sufficiently believable for its behaviour to hurt.

John Hurt’s narration gives the storytelling a welcome steadiness. Yet the voice can also make the moral lessons feel over-explained, as if the performances could not be trusted to make them clear. Editor Molly Malene Stensgaard keeps the spare setting from becoming inert, but cannot solve the script’s habit of returning to points already established. Once we understand the danger in Grace’s dependence, each further demonstration has to justify the time it takes. The pace becomes wearing well before there is any shortage of acting to admire.

As a small-town thriller, Dogville offers little of the pleasure of watching a mystery gradually become clear. Von Trier makes the town’s moral failings his subject, and the stripped-down staging asks us to pay attention to how people treat one another. Its American setting need not confine the film’s reach: the exploitation of someone who needs help is hardly difficult to recognise elsewhere. The strongest passages trust us to make that connection without further instruction.

The problem is how often von Trier appears dissatisfied with having made himself understood. The repetition makes us increasingly aware of the writer arranging the townspeople, and it risks turning their cruelty into something we merely wait through. That is a serious limitation in a film that depends on keeping us troubled by another person’s suffering. Choose it when there is time to sit with something bleak, and time afterwards to argue about it.