It is easy to hate Lars von Trier. The Danish rabble-rouser of international cinema knows how to push the buttons of America's educated liberal elite (the only ones in this country who see his films), and he does it in the most egregious manner possible: by dismissing any idea of a benevolent American social order. Never mind that he has never actually visited the United States, or that many of the problems he ascribes to America can be found elsewhere -- these facts just serve to further support his ultimate aim, which is to rile, disgust, and provoke anyone who thinks the United States might be deserving of more than utter and complete contempt.
What makes von Trier especially infuriating is his unwillingness to do anything besides sling crap at America -- his fatalism is so suffocating that he views any attempt at redressing the country's problems as pointless or additionally destructive. There is no credit given for noble intentions or minor accomplishments, just more scorn for those who would consider celebrating such things. Nowhere is this clearer than in his latest film Manderlay, the second in a supposed trilogy (von Trier has postponed work on the third film) on America's social problems and the sequel to his polarizing and audacious Dogville. In Manderlay, von Trier's misanthropy reaches such heights that it seems perfectly reasonable to dismiss the entire enterprise out of hand.
And yet to do so would be ignore the director's immense artistic talent for gripping the viewer with images and stories that, while certainly not elegant, have an undeniable power. His previous films, Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, with their bravura camera techniques and long-suffering characters, have proven von Trier is a challenging storyteller and an unrivaled cinematic innovator. In Dogville, he added a strong dose of anti-Americanism to the formula, choosing to submit his female heroine to a barrage of abuses at the hands of seemingly goodhearted small-town Americans. Dogville's condemnation of American idealism was overdone, but the stylistic direction and superb performances were, as usual, thrilling. And as with Dogville, it is perfectly possible to sit through Manderlay with a clear sense that most of the underlying politics are bogus and still be fully captivated and compliant with von Trier's narrative ambitions nonetheless. The message is muddled and often just plain wrong, but the means of expressing it are bold enough to make it worth hearing.
That message this time around has to do with race relations in the United States, for the title of von Trier's new film takes its name from an imaginary southern plantation where slavery still exists 70 years after the end of the Civil War. Having left the sadistic citizens of Dogville with the aid of her gangster father and his hoods, the idealistic Grace (Bryce Newton Howard, replacing the far more effective Nicole Kidman in the role) discovers Manderlay when one of the area's slaves beseeches her to come to the rescue of another who is being punished for stealing. Astonished that the institution of slavery is still being kept alive, Grace demands that the slaves be released and eventually decides to oversee their transition from oppression to freedom when the old matron of Manderlay (Lauren Bacall) dies and leaves the plantation's denizens without the authoritarian hand they've come to expect.
A white force with the best of intentions trying to bring democracy and freedom to a previously oppressed group of people -- where have we seen this before? Needless to say, Grace's attempt at nation-building in Manderlay offers all sorts of obstacles, and von Trier is all too happy to exploit the parallels with the current Iraq situation. Before long, Grace's democratic ideals become subverted to the point where she is nearly as dominating as the previous master, requiring that the former slaves attend classes on democracy and chastising them for being wasteful and unproductive. (When they have completed the courses, she condescendingly declares them “graduate Americans.”) She even goes so far as to make the former white landowners live in shabbier quarters and occasionally wear blackface. Not surprisingly, Manderlay descends into chaos the moment the gangsters who had been enforcing the law there leave -- an obvious but still pointed critique of both the situation in Iraq and the end of Reconstruction in the postbellum South.
Sadly, von Trier's other efforts at racial commentary are less persuasive and, more often than not, simply confusing. His general argument seems to be that any claim of racial equality in the United States is a complete sham, so much so that slavery may have been a more dignified and at the very least less hypocritical system. It's a radical theory -- and Manderlay, with its Brechtian staging (as with Dogville, the film is shot on a sound stage with chalk outlines serving as set pieces) and didactic language is nothing if not a vehicle for indulging in such academic theories -- but one that needs far more than Manderlay's unsubtle schema to stand up to the slightest scrutiny. The film's depiction of Manderlay's slaves offers a more compelling argument regarding the way an oppressed group of people can come to welcome and even reproduce their oppression, but von Trier merely suggests this idea while focusing on others that require much less nuance.
Given the moralizing tone and wrongheaded politics just described, it may be hard to believe that one could still call Manderlay an entertaining film. But the film has many moments of ingenuity, from Zeljko Ivanek's role as a gambler hired by white plantation owners to cheat blacks of their money to the provocative closing credits featuring numerous photographs of racial violence. Plus von Trier's audaciousness deserves credit: Who else in cinema is even making such wild arguments and doing so in such a bold manner? Part of the fun of watching his films is waiting to be infuriated, shocked, or generally discomfited in ways that demand an intelligent response. Dismissing Manderlay as the work of a crank may be easy but, considering the number of filmmakers who expect nothing of their audience, he is clearly a crank worth having around.
Sudhir Muralidhar is a writer living in New York.
