The film is anything, but subtle. It is direct with a narrator who is bold enough to philosophize and "explain". Manderlay "reads" like an essay, a rather intellectually bitter one.

Under the layer which makes a folly out of what "democracy" stands for, there is a cry stemming from existential crisis. The mass of population, containing those without concern for the "mass", but only concerned for their own comforts and necessities to regulate the their lives most "accordingly", the individuals are put at a stake, to the point where they despair over the fact that no one is there to thank them and to appreciate their motive to better themselves and others. There is a whole confusion of id and…

43/100

[Reviewed from Cannes '05]

Trilogies invariably sound intriguing in theory, but they rarely work very well in practice. Lars von Trier's Dogville is my favorite film of roughly the last five years, and so I had ridiculously high hopes for the sequel, Manderlay, in which Grace (now played by Bryce Dallas Howard) happens upon an Alabama plantation and is horrified to discover that the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has yet to be enforced within its walls. Alas, it suffers from massive deficiencies in both form and content. Dogville's neo-Brechtian use of a massive bare soundstage, augmented with chalk outlines and a few simple props, served a crucial purpose, underlining the tale's allegorical nature; here, employed again, it's…

Sequel to Dogville, with Grace moving on to the Manderlay plantation estate where she liberates the slaves 70 years after the white landowners were legally obliged to do so, handing over the deeds to the former slaves and making them shareholders in the process. But their freedom is a culture shock, and Grace ends up trying to teach them about democracy and co-operation like she's a particularly patronising episode of Sesame Street. Once again the story plays out on a blank stage (albeit with a few more actual buildings than in Dogville), though Nicole Kidman has been replaced by Bryce Dallas Howard, who does a decent job of taking the role on, though she doesn't have to do too much…

Grace is not only played by a different actress, but she seems to have become the next progressive step within herself and, though it seems a cliche to precede this description with the term "reckless", I'm going to very nearly do it - - Grace has become a forceful advocate for an agenda so rife with flaws, Von Trier has practically abandoned any simulacrum of understanding for her naivete (because, really, she's already been schooled in the reversal of well-meaning societal concepts) or her position. He suggests that her interventionist liberation of a slave plantation cultivates the inconclusive lessons of two separate ideas - the protruding wrong in slavery's foundation with its permeating gloom in modern society and the slipping…