'Manderlay' is messy and hypocritical, but it packs a nice punch

Friday, February 24, 2006

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE P-I

The second of Lars von Trier's grand cinematic statements about "America" (which von Trier has never actually visited) takes on nothing less than the volatile issue of racism and the legacy of slavery. He tackles it with teeth bared behind a sneering grin.

MOVIE REVIEW

MANDERLAY

DIRECTOR: Lars von Trier

CAST: Bryce Dallas Howard, Isaach De Bankole, Danny Glover, Willem Dafoe

RUNNING TIME: 133 minutes

RATING: No rating, features strong language, nudity and a scene of explicit sexuality

WHERE: Uptown

GRADE: B-

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"Manderlay" picks up where "Dogville" left off, right down to von Trier's sober, exaggerated theatricality, mannered dialogue (which plays like a 1930s stage play) and vast, sparsely set artificial stage.

Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard, taking over the part from Nicole Kidman with earnestness in place of Kidman's innocence), the idealistic gangster's daughter, stumbles across an Alabama plantation where slavery remains in effect in 1930, 70 years after abolition.

Driven by good intentions and righteous indignation, emancipator Grace transforms the plantation into a grand experiment in "freed enterprise." She awards the slaves communal owners and makes the former owners indentured servants under her "benign" dictatorship, decreeing democracy and equality at gunpoint while posing as just another working-class comrade.

It looks more like a lampoon of communism than a satire of American liberal idealism and social paternalism, while the scattershot spray of von Trier's satirical potshots both lambaste and embrace racial and social stereotypes. The timing of the release only makes the irony of a Danish director -- especially one this arrogant and intellectually garish -- criticizing race relations in America all the more entertaining.

At heart, it's an absurdist comedy with a deadpan delivery and run through with the very hypocrisy that von Trier mercilessly ridicules.

Yet it's so ruthlessly witty and meticulously plotted -- unexpectedly so, given its messy dramatic sprawl -- that it delivers a satisfying kick. Not for von Trier's sarcastic satirical jabs but for his shameless bravado, his flagrant desire to offend everyone, and his brazen take on poetic justice in a fantasy America only he could imagine.