Manderlay
dir. Lars von Trier
2005

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."
- Kris 'K'

"Victory in Iraq is essential."
- George 'B'

"I hope Neil Young will remember: a southern man don't need him around anyhow."
- Lynard 'S'

Does Lars von Trier have it in for women? After Dancer in the Dark (aka The Passion of the Bjork) and Dogville, it may be safe to say so, but he sure gives them plenty of work.

Manderlay is the sequel to 2003's Dogville and is the second film in a proposed trilogy on America (to end with Wasington.)

In Dogville, Nicole Kidman plays Grace, an idealistic young woman with a mysterious past and on the run from the law who is at first taken in warmly and then slowly tormented and tortured by the inhabitants of a small Colorado town.

If you haven't seen Dogville, a word of warning: this review contains spoilers.

Stop reading now. Seriously.

Okay, after escaping from Dogville, Grace (now played by Bryce Dallas Howard) and her father quite naturally take a drive to Alabama, which holds a great deal of interest for gangsters and their daughters. There, they run across a plantation known as Manderlay, where slavery (despite having been abolished 70 years earlier) is apparently still practiced.

Grace, having learned it seems nothing from her experiences in Colorado, stays behind along with some of her father's henchmen and vows to bring democracy to the people of Ira...uh, Manderlay.

After that, everything goes really well. Stop reading if you want to believe this. Seriously, stop.

Upon liberating the slaves from the oppressive rule of their master Mam (Lauren Bacall), Grace sets about establishing a functioning democracy. But she finds that the slaves have grown so dependent on Manderlay's system of laws (called 'Mam's Law') that they are essentially unable to function without it.

As the slaves shift their dependence from old Mam to Grace, she finds herself increasingly imprisioned by the very oppressive law she sought to supplant.

"How dumb do you think we are, Miss Grace?" asks Wilhelm (Danny Glover), the spokesman of for the slave population. "Too dumb to build a ladder if we really wanted to get away? My God, after 70 years, don't you think we could have set ourselves free if that's what we wanted?"

In a time of simple answers to complex questions ("cut n' run!" "stay the course!"), it's refreshing to see a filmmaker struggle to capture the overwhelming complexity of the human condition. In von Trier's world, moral clarity isn't just rare; it's non-existent. Ideas like right and wrong are overwhelmed by rationalization, compromise, custom and conflicts of legitimate interest.

In Manderlay, as in Dogville, the underlying struggle is that between the idealism of the naive individual and the brutality of the collective.

The individual idealist (Grace) has a clarity of vision, but lacks perspective. She is blindsided by the simple conundra which emerge in any practical society, such as how to handle the case of the slaves calling for the execution of one of their own who is caught stealing food. Stealing food when you're hungry is an understandable crime. But when the jury is also hungry, sympathy is hard to come by.

The collective can rationalize their brutality by distributing the blame. No single person need do any wrong, but between their reasonable defenses of their own interests, horrible injustices can emerge.

In both films, the resolution of this conflict seems to boil down to keeping an attractive young woman in bondage. This probably has more to do with von Trier's personal tastes than any larger theme.

Von Trier has been critized for having so much to say about the US without ever having visited. This criticism is more apt to Manderlay, which makes many specific comments about US black history, than with Dogville, which could have taken place just as easily in any small town in the world. But both films speak directly to a universal human experience: the struggle to define public values and personal morality.

At the current moment, the nation trembles in fear of "San Francisco Values(tm)" overwhelming our culture. Will the new speaker elect be our Grace? We shall see...

Four stars. Talkin' Jason sez that a free and democratic Manderlay is our strategy.