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Opportunity knocks Admirably ambitious, if somewhat tone-deaf, Lars von Trier's Manderlay is easily upstaged by its own final bit of punctuation, a variation on the finale of the previous "USA — Land of Opportunities" installment, Dogville. Ku Klux Klan rallies, lynchings, wrenching poverty, and civil rights protests flash across the screen, driven home with the impassioned wail of David Bowie at his symphonic pseudo–soul man peak, testifying to those bewitching, bewildering "Young Americans." Despite the bare stages decorated only with Brechtian Caucasian chalk circles (and augmented by the soothing yet scabrous tones of narrator John Hurt), one senses von Trier aspires to the untethered realism and seemingly scattershot, dialogue-engendering power of the photojournalism in those closing credits. Bare-bones Dogme 95 has shape-shifted into bare-faced artifice, but that doesn't mean a filmmaker can't let a little nostalgic emotion slip. Perhaps von Trier simply lacks a feel for the subject of race and, in particular, the still-painful issue of slavery, but the passion he worked into his bitter musings on small minds in Dogville's "Our Town" America is all but missing in Manderlay. The problems start with the shadows that dominate the mise-en-scène (perhaps inspiring gripes about how the great Dane doesn't know how to shoot black people) and continue through to the brave but ill-equipped Bryce Dallas Howard. As the trilogy's heroine, Grace, she attempts to step into Nicole Kidman's Mary Janes — only to be swallowed up by them. Here, Grace — von Trier's Daisy Miller or Sister Carrie, a young American as innocent as the daughter of a gangster or robber baron can be — finds herself on an Alabama plantation where time appears to have stopped in the ugly throes of slavery. Eager now to ensure justice, Grace halts the flogging of the proud slave Timothy (Isaach De Bankolé) and sets about righting the wrongs of the plantation, giving the now-freed slaves, headed by Wilhelm (Danny Glover), lessons in democracy and communal ideals. Needless to say, the undertaking is more difficult than Grace realizes. Oh, these young Americans, von Trier seems to tsk-tsk, they simply want to feel good about themselves at all costs and placate their parents (with Howard adding an imagined Happy Days–meets–Cinderella Man paterfamilias dimension). Matters come to a head when Grace is accused of viewing the black men and women around her as types rather as than human beings. Yet, intentionally or not, von Trier falls into the same trap, barely visualizing the violence of Timothy's flogging while ritualistically detailing the same character's interracial sex scene. As von Trier takes on noblesse oblige, so-called white man's burden, and the futility of democracy, one is left with the lingering impression that he's turned his lens back on himself and his own backyard. Less and less enamored of his — if not Bowie's — youthful Yankees, he's becoming as jaundiced as an old-world aristo. (Kimberly Chun)
Opens Fri/10 Lumiere Theatre 1572 California, SF (415) 267-4893 Act I and II 2128 Center, Berk. (510) 464-5980
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