America in Black and White

The advantage of being a prankster/provocateur is that you can feed people shovels full of bullshit and then mock them for eating it. So far, in over two decades of work, Lars Von Trier has made movies about women who debase themselves for God, intellectuals who pretend to be retarded, and film after film about bigoted Americans who presume to tell people how to think—all while periodically asserting ascetic guidelines for “good” cinema. To his detractors, Von Trier is a humorless scold whose only real talent lies in self-promotion. But there’s a subtle puckishness to Von Trier that indicates he may be fully aware of—and enjoying—what an asshole he is. Von Trier’s Manderlay is a sequel to his 2003 film Dogville, and the middle film of a trilogy that’s either been permanently abandoned or just postponed, depending on the director’s mood when asked about it. Like Dogville, Manderlay was shot on digital video, on a mostly bare stage with a few props and painted marks. John Hurt returns as the stentorian narrator, his voice slathered in hot buttered irony, but the heroine, Grace, is now played by Bryce Dallas Howard instead of Nicole Kidman. Having destroyed Dogville, Grace heads across the country with her father (now played by Willem Dafoe instead of James Caan) and demands to stop a while in Alabama after she comes across a cotton plantation still using blacks as slave labor, 70 years after the Civil War. Grace emancipates them, then commences a series of lessons on how to live as free, responsible citizens—only to find that she doesn’t know as much about the nature of slavery and freedom as she thought. Manderlay’s similarities to Dogville extend beyond the characters and style. Once again, Von Trier can’t resist degrading his female lead (as he also did in Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark). Grace gets held up as a smug fool who makes things worse by butting in, and when she develops a destructive crush on a regal ex-slave (played by Isaach De Bankolé), he strips her naked, drapes a handkerchief over her face and has rough sex with her. The movie traffics in shocks and bathos designed to get the audience riled up, even if their anger is ultimately directed at the filmmaker. Von Trier makes good sport of the fact that Grace can’t tell one black person from another, but it’s hard to know how much of the ignorance in Manderlay is the characters’, and how much is Von Trier’s. Though his faux-tony theatricality mumbles, “Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this,” the movie’s simplistic reversals ultimately lack the revelatory power of Kevin Willmott’s C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, where the racist “alternate America” at least looked creepily familiar. It would’ve been a bold experiment if Von Trier had scrapped the finished Manderlay in favor of a documentary about how his actors (including activist Danny Glover) really feel about his isolationist European vision of African American life. As it is, there’s something listless and perfunctory about Manderlay, as though Von Trier followed through on the production only because he’d already announced it. The film is intended partly as a critique of American foreign policy, with some satirical swipes at the self-righteousness of the democratic process. But Von Trier’s not really making a complicated argument so much as setting up dominoes and knocking them down. On close examination, the movie’s plot doesn’t make much sense, and it takes twice as long as it needs to get where it’s going. But give Von Trier his due: he knows how to make movies that at least feel profound. Manderlay peaks at its closing credits, which, as in Dogville, feature a parade of archival photos documenting American degeneracy, set to David Bowie’s “Young Americans.” Coming after the movie’s last couple of gut-punch plot twists and John Hurt’s growly, smug last lines, the grand finale sends people out of the theater thinking they’ve just seen something significant. Suckered again.