Lars von Trier's peculiar compulsion to humiliate his heroines (and by extension the actresses who play them) has crescendoed to a deafening din of indiscriminate, exasperating martyrdom in this daring experiment of heightened performance and minimalist filmmaking that is fatally undermined by the Danish writer-director's conceit as a narrator. While his storytelling and cinematic style are as compellingly unorthodox as ever (the austere mountain township setting comes through perfectly even though it's shot on an empty sound stage), he's never seemed so arbitrary in his sadism than in this allegory of a beautiful, 1930s flapper fugitive hiding from the mob amongst a tiny populace that behaviorally moves from distrustful to accepting to maliciously cruel (to the point of daily multiple rapes in exchange for not turning her in). Nicole Kidman is astounding in the lead as a porcelain enigma of self-flagellation, but von Trier offers no insight whatsoever into what motivates the malevolence of the rest of the town (despite brilliant performances from a stellar cast). Only in its portentous finale does Dogville mount any satisfactory credibility, and by then it's too late. Not a necessary purchase. [Note: DVD extras include audio commentary by director Lars von Trier and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, and a trailer. Bottom line: a small extras package for a film that uniformly split critics.] (R. Blackwelder)
Dogville
Lions Gate, 178 min., R, VHS: $49.99, DVD: $26.98, Aug. 24 Volume 19, Issue 5
Dogville
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