Manderlay (2005)

2024: Post #71
Watched April 21st
As part of the Curzon Lars von Trier Complete Collection IMDB
Directed by: Lars von Trier
Written by: Lars von Trier
TSPDT: 7,242

138 minutes. Oh boy. 

Before I even get into the troubling content I think it’s important to set up the film. Dogville was the first in this trilogy that von Trier was going to make about America. Manderlay was going to be the middle movie. He had initially wanted Nicole Kidman from Dogville to be in all three films, and even made her promise in an interview at Cannes in front of the press. For reasons that have officially only ever gone down as ‘scheduling conflicts’, Kidman did not return. Enter Bryce Dallas Howard to claim the role previously filled by one of the best actors of our generation. 

So Grace returns and we meet her crossing the country from the mountains of Colorado to the slave plantation in Louisiana. Only problem is the year is 1933 and slavery hasn’t been around for a minute. So Grace decides to stay and play the role of white savior to a farm that somehow never got the news that slaves were free. She meets the white owner of the estate, known as Man, and quickly meets Wilhelm as well. Wilhelm is a slave but is in the house with Mam and appears to be the most educated of the imprisoned. 

Like Dogville, this is shot on a soundstage with minimal props. It is a fable of sorts, told in chapters, and has a similar feeling where Grace knows everything and can do anything but struggles to change the minds of the people she meets in her journeys. It is a movie that is without a doubt in the same universe, but it is also a movie that does not match the quality of Dogville on any level. Of all the offensive things von Trier pulled off in Manderlay, the most offensive is possibly the fact that he just made a bad movie. It’s written without the same emotional depth, the acting is worse, there’s just not a reason this movie needs to exist. 

And that’s without the fact it’s an extremely uncomfortable film to have been written by a white non-American. Why he chose to write and make this film I will never understand. He goes to major effort to make sure we know there are 7 different types of n*gg**s on the plantation. It feels like him and Tarantino (with Django) got together and laughed maniacally about what they could get away with as long as the movie was generally on the side of the Black Americans. Anyways, von Trier made a bunch of bold decisions in the script, including trying to shoehorn in a logic that maybe it was actually better for a group of people to remain enslaved if they weren’t ready to live in the new world. 

Defenders of the movie will probably point out that it wasn’t really a story about slavery as much as a story about white privilege and how Grace got the choice to just pick up and leave when things got tough. I’ll listen to that, but it can’t overlook the fact von Trier is out of his depth here and missed the cultural nuances required to make this movie even if he had done his research and had good evidence on paper of what he wanted to do. And, like I said, maybe worst of all is he just didn’t make a very good movie.