The first film in what Lars Von Trier plans to be a trilogy about America has drawn numerous comparisons to Thornton Wilder for its treatment of small-town American life and bold, Brechtian staging. But the film doesn't so much call the playwright's beloved Our Town to mind as it does his screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's SHADOW OF A DOUBT, particularly the moment when murderous Uncle Charlie explains to his wide-eyed niece that if you ripped the fronts from most American houses, you'd find swine. Von Trier's swine are the residents of Dogville, a tiny Depression-era Rocky Mountain township that offers reluctant refuge to Grace (Nicole Kidman), a mysterious fugitive on the run from gangsters. Anticipating the inevitable appearance of Depression-stricken refugees, Dogville's resident philosopher, Tom Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany), has been organizing a series of lectures aimed at broadening the town's spirit of charity and acceptance. When Grace appears, hounded by gunshots and scrounging for food, Tom thinks he's found the perfect test subject. His neighbors, however, remain wary; to convince them, Tom offers each household Grace's services for one hour every day; if after two weeks they still don't like her, she'll leave town. Desperate and eager to please, Grace rakes gooseberry bushes for Ma Ginger (Lauren Bacall); tends to Tom's hypochondriacal father (Philip Baker Hall); discusses sunsets with blind Jack McKay (Ben Gazzara); and looks after the brood of children belonging to Vera (Patricia Clarkson) and her surly husband, Chuck (Stellan Skarsgard). Soon even suspicious Mrs. Henson (Blair Brown) takes a shine to Grace, and her curvaceous daughter, Liz (Chloe Sevigny), is thrilled to have another pretty girl around to divert the amorous attentions of Dogville's men. The town unanimously agrees to take Grace in, but when the police show up looking for the woman they claim is a bank robber, the good people of Dogville find more and more dehumanizing ways of exploiting their vulnerable charge. Breaking completely from the strictures Von Trier himself set forth in his Dogme95 manifesto, this brilliantly acted film is a highly stylized, surprisingly successful experiment that sits somewhere between theater and cinema. The near complete absence of sets is cleverly offset by John Hurt's folksy, slyly ironic narration and Per Streit's excellent sound design. The film, however, is not without flaws: Only the heavy stylization mitigates some highly artificial plot contrivances, and the final photo montage of America's poor, while no doubt exciting to Von Trier the provocateur, is maddeningly oblique. --Ken Fox
