Manderlay

The most insightful films about the Holocaust certainly haven’t been made by Germans, so why shouldn’t a Dane director investigate the legacy of slavery in the United States? Of course, that leaves redemption and uplifting escapes out of the script, but the story Lars von Trier tells is filled with assumptions, speculations, and unexpected turns that make Manderlay less a history lesson than an allegory. The second film in his “America Trilogy” finds Grace (played by Bryce Dallas Howard; Nicole Kidman declined this itchy sequel to Dogville) and her gangster father discovering a plantation where slavery was apparently never abolished. Appalled, Grace confronts the dying master and takes over, intending to run the place as a free community and make right a situation that has simmered to a point of psychological perversion. That hardly makes it an uplifting film, though. Von Trier shifts the victim role around with casual and even insulting ease, and his script takes enough dark and uncomfortable turns that many African-American actors were turned off (though Danny Glover takes a leading role, most of the other black characters are played by British actors). Ultimately, Manderlay is a sort of bizarre fairy tale–one made by a man who, because of his fear of flying, has never even come here.