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| 2005 NYFF Films Introduction Good Night, and Good Luck Regular Lovers The Death of Mr. Lazarescu Methadonia L'Enfant (The Child) Bubble The Squid and the Whale I Am Capote Something Like Happiness Sympathy for Lady Vengeance Manderlay Tale of Cinema Breakfast on Pluto Through the Forest The President's Last Bang Who's Camus Anyway? Three Times Paradise Now Tristram Shandy Gabrielle The Sun The Passenger Cache (Hidden) | Manderlay Lars von Trier, Denmark / Sweeden / France, 2005, 139 min.  If you found Dogvillle dreary you may like Manderlay no better, but at least you'll be happy to learn it's an hour shorter. It's sharper and more specific in its topics too. There's no great reason to consider this a letdown. Grace (now played by Bryce Dallas Howard) insists on being let off by her father at a southern cotton plantation where slavery still prevails. The film is based upon an account in the preface to A Story of O about a group of slaves on Barbados who refused to be set free. The boss lady, Mam (Lauren Bacall), is dying and Grace takes over to set things right -- or so she thinks; her project to democratize the slaves goes rapidly downhill. Danny Glover, who plays Wilhelm (pronounced "Willim"), the old slave closest to boss lady Mam, has commented that the script views matters only from a white man's point of view, and von Trier has agreed that this is true. It was hard to get black Americans to act in the film because the Negroes in it are not admirable -- no Denzel Washington hero types. However, black audience members were among the most enthusiastic at the New York press screening. In the premise there is of course a certain implication that in the black Americans have never ceased to be slaves. Von Trier argued in an interview that after emancipation blacks were unwilling to take up the struggle to establish a place in society, but he also acknowledged that all the blame for oppression rests on white people. He had this interesting comment to make: "Every major town or city in the USA with respect for itself has a Holocaust museum, but none has a museum of the racial oppression that took place within the USA itself." (Chris Knipp) |
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