Dogville (2003)
I remembered reading about this film many years ago in an Empire magazine, and realizing I didn’t understand the purpose of it at all. I’m not sure I understand the purpose of it now, even, but now that I’ve watched it I can safely say it’s one of the most stunning things I have ever seen.
Grace (Nicole Kidman), a woman on the run from the mob, is reluctantly accepted in a small Colorado town thanks to Tom (Paul Bettany), the resident philosopher. In exchange, she agrees to work for them. As a search visits town, she finds out that their support has a price. Yet her dangerous secret is never far away.
I had to borrow the plot summary from IMDB again because I honestly don’t know how else to summarize the film without giving much away. This is the second film I’m reviewing on here which I can say I don’t particularly like (the first was Black Swan) but which gets an exceptionally high rating from me anyway.
The first thing I have to say about it is that it is exceptionally well made. The entire film is shot on a semi-empty set. Every house is drawn on the floor, they have no walls, and only props that the characters actively use are physical, tangible things. It’s like watching a theatre performance filmed by multiple cameras. The characters mime doors being opened and closed, they mime knocking… and even without the sound effects that were added in in post, the entire set is incredibly and almost unbelievably believable. I can say without a doubt that the technique is so unusual that it just happens to work here. It’s the most original movie set-up I’ve seen in a very long time.
The entire film is narrated by an invisible voice that not only sets the scene for every event but also gives insight into the minds of many of the characters. Along with the incredibly minimalistic set, the narration adds to the strangeness of the film and the situations that occur in it.
I’ll admit I am rather a fan of Nicole Kidman, even though many people I like and whose opinions I respect dislike her. As Grace, she adds the perfect amount of innocence and humaneness that is needed to the film. She’s the stranger that comes into a small town, a town that has grown up with the same people in the same place, and inadvertently catalyzes changes in it, and in the people that live there. I have to say that for a while Grace’s apparent inability to react at all to the things happening to her confused and somewhat annoyed me, but all her actions make perfect sense towards the climax of the film.
Paul Bettany is another actor that I highly admire, but one who is not as well-known as he should be, considering his talent. He made Tom both sympathetic and hapless, and what’s surprising is that by the time the conclusion rolled around I didn’t know whether I pitied him or hated him. Now that I think about it more I think it was a mix of both… which is really one of the reasons that I can’t deny this film’s genius: it’s so human. I once wrote a 4,000-word essay about (essentially) the difference between human-ness and humane-ness. In this film, all the characters are completely human, but they are far from humane. They are fully aware of what they’re doing, but it seems that few realize it’s wrong.
I think at the core of it, the reason I didn’t like this film wasn’t because it was made strangely or because it confused me, no, those were the reasons I really appreciated it. The reason, I think, that I didn’t like the film was because it made me incredibly uncomfortable knowing that the message at the end, and the realizations that I got after the credits began to roll were too close for comfort for me. Or anyone, I think. Having one’s humanity and lack of humane-ness laid bare is not something a lot of films do, and the fact that this film did it so openly and in such a raw unrefined fashion is what makes it so uncomfortable and, ultimately, unforgettable.
This film gets an 8/10 from me. As I mentioned before, I didn’t like it but I can’t deny how amazing it was. That’s not to say I hated the film, though. I can honestly say that I really did not like Black Swan and that I will never in my life watch it again, but with Dogville I’m as yet undecided as to whether or not I will watch it again. It’s an incredibly intriguing film, but it’s not an easy watch. It’s far from an easy watch, which is why I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. My best bet, really, would be to offer it up to people who are unafraid of seeing more in the mirror than just face-value. And since a friend told me he would possibly watch the film for a sociological movie night, I would safely offer it up to sociologists. At least, those who’ve finally and fully lost their rose-tinted specs.
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