What say we leave the Stalinist criticism to the National Review?
By When recently discussing the best-reviewed movies of the year, I (perhaps willfully) left one obvious candidate out. Well, among the best critics of the vaguely alternative press, I’m afraid Before Sunset is the year’s best-reviewed film. Since I haven’t actually seen it, I guess I can’t say more than I already have. Although if it’s better than #2 or #4 I would donate half of all my future earnings to the RNC.
I have, unfortunately, seen #3. I can’t nominate a worst movie of the year–not being a professional, I avoid the best candidates–but Dogville must be the most dismaying. Lars von Trier is not without talent and has made good movies before, but between the silly cameos, leaden pace, and banal, relentlessly self-congratulatory politics he’s become a Stanley Kramer for pretentious assholes. The fact that he dresses up his cliches with pointless avant-garde moves rather than square dramatizations just makes it worse. To discuss the aesthetics of Dogville is beside the point, anyway. I have yet to see a critic offer a plausible expressive function served by the line-drawn sets; it’s obvious that it’s just irrelevant wankery. Getting to the point, Voice critic Dennis Lim offers his defense: “Whether or not you buy Lars von Trier’s view of Americawait, why don’t you buy Lars von Trier’s view of America? Has it really been that hard this year?”
Ah, yes, now we get to the heart of the matter; the interminable Dogville is A Bracing Laying Bare of George W. Bush’s America. Not only is this irrelevant to the film’s actual merits, it’s not even right. The minor problem is that the film provides rather more convincing evidence of von Trier’s issues with women than “America’s.” I was willing to cut him some slack for the humiliation he visited on the fearless Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, but enough. Once a philosopher, twice a pervert, thrice a misogynist. The major problem is that this movie is not about America, or American politics, or anything other than the director’s preening self-righteousness. The repellent and pathetically cliched closing, in which “Young Americans” is played over a montage of photos of American poverty, is a necessary attempted grounding because the rest of the movie fails to convey anything other than von Trier’s highly uninteresting thoughts about the crudest abstractions. I happen, in general, to prefer European democratic political arrangements to their rapidly worsening American counterpart myself, but you have to be a Grade A moron to think that there’s something uniquely American about conformity and violence and gender oppression. (And while, of course, worthwhile political thoughts are not necessary components to making a good movie, they are when your movie is nothing but a crude metaphor for said thoughts.) And then you have John Hurt’s fake middlebrow narration, intended to convey the earth-shattering insight that small town America is not actually as it’s portrayed in 50s sitcoms and nostalgic plays. Boy, that routine never gets tired!
The fact that this abject disaster ranks above Sideways is every bit as embarrassing as Roger Ebert recommending Garfield the Movie or Jersey Girl. George Bush is a terrible, terrible president, but he cannot make a shitty movie good merely because it’s made by an anti-American crank.