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The vast majority of the people I know in New York seem to have both seen and loved Dancer in the Dark. But one or two have hated it, including Jonathan Foreman, of the New York Post. One of Jonathan’s theories is that the reason it’s gone down so well is that the Upper West Side intelligentsia never normally goes to tear-jerker., When they do, and especially when the film says "Palm D’Or Winner" and "Lars von Trier" on it, our sheltered cinephiles assume that whatever they’re watching must be Good Art. There might be something to this theory — I can think of no other reason why Philadelphia would have won any Oscars, or been so broadly admired. But I have to say, I think the real reason that people love the film so much is because it’s really good. Anyway, this is what Jonathan has to say in the New York Post. I'm reprinting it here, in blatant violation of Rupert Murdoch's copyright; apologies, Rupert.
First, we must note what Jonathan didn’t write, even accounting for space considerations. He didn’t write that Bjork, as well as turning in an amazing performance for any actress, let alone a first-time one, also manages the unprecedented act of writing and performing all her own songs in the film. She was intimately involved in the whole thing, and the seamlessness of the songs, the performance, and her performance of the songs is part of what makes the film great. Now I love the soundtrack CD, and I think the songs are amazing quite regardless of how good the film is. But it does seem a bit much to review a musical without ever mentioning the songs. But what did our friend write? We’ll excuse him the headline, which was probably the work of someone else. But that doesn’t excuse much. First, we get "manipulative schlock decked out in the trappings of art." I don’t know what Jonathan considers "the trappings of art," but it’s not exactly what I saw up on screen. Beautifully-framed shots? No, none of those in sight, except for maybe a couple of cut-aways in the musical sequences. Portentious pretentiousness? None of that either. Any time the film threatens to come close, it rescues itself with a musical sequence. No, I think what Jonathan means when he talks of his "trappings" is no more and no less than the whole Dogma look — the hand-held camera, the muted colours of digital video, the lack of a soundtrack (itself revolutionary in a musical). I know this isn’t officially a Dogma film, but there’s definitely a lot of that ethos in there. And while Dogma might be an art-house movement, I hardly consider it fair to reverse-engineer the look, as it were, and call it art. One word about the hand-held camera: a colleague of mine got quite nauseous watching the film, and certainly it took a bit of getting used to. One would think that after the spate of Dogma films, not to mention The Blair Witch Project, we'd be used to it by now. But it would seem that the disorienting effect is still there. I think it worked to better effect in Breaking the Waves, where the jerkiness and confusion at the beginning was slowly transformed into beatific still shots at the end. Breaking the Waves was much more of a work of art than Dancer in the Dark, I think. It had a structure and an overarching theme and characters and got you thinking profound thoughts about human nature — whereas Dancer is both less and more. I don’t think it’s really capable of changing one’s life in the way that Breaking the Waves could and did. But it’s also more personally touching than that film: Selma is a more sympathetic character than Emily Watson’s Bess. While it’s true, as Jonathan points out, that the two films are similar in many ways, ultimately Selma’s motivation is comprehensible without recourse to supernatural interventions, which has to make her actions that much easier to understand. And while Selma’s refusal to break the late Bill’s confidence on the witness stand is incomprehensible, her conviction that her son’s sight is more important than her being able to spend the rest of her life behind bars is not.Virtually all Bess’s actions, on the other hand, make no rational sense at all. That’s why you’ve got to laugh, really, when you read that Emily Watson’s behaviour in Breaking the Waves was understandable, whereas Bjork’s in Dancer are not; that the latter, indeed, has an "absurd plot." The idea that having pathologically suicidal promiscuous sex could cure one’s husband of a fatal injury is not absurd, then. Yet the idea that a mother would sacrifice herself for her son’s well-being is ridiculous. I’m not saying the plot is a paragon of verisimilitude: I’m just saying this is a Lars von Trier film. Udo Kier is much more realistic here than he is as a 12 foot tall newborn baby in The Kingdom, I can tell you that much. Anyway, we must move on to Jonathan’s next brickbat, "unwatchable." I don’t know what that means, at least not insofar as it can’t be applied to any Dogma-ethos film. But never mind, he’s running on: "as meretricious a piece of fakery as ever beguiled a festival audience." Oh, you know those festival audiences, so easily swayed by superficiality and fakery; we, of course, know better. But "meretricious"? That’s an interesting word to use, especially considering that later on in the review the film is panned for its "East European looking factory" and its "dreary video." I mean, make your mind up, Foreman: is this a showy piece of style over substance, or is this a badly-put-together piece of dullness? I guess it’s the former: you do go on to call it "kitschy schlock gussied up with the trappings of artiness." It’s not kitschy; I don’t think it’s possible for a film shot on handheld video with a colour palette of browns and greys to be kitschy. As for the schlock, yes, well, there’s definitely tears being jerked. But hello? It’s a musical, ferchrissakes! The musical form is inherently schlocky. I defy you to say your heart didn’t jump at least a little bit when Joel Grey started tap-dancing on the judge’s desk in the courtroom. That’s a great scene of musical cinema, and no more schlocky than any number of scenes from, oh, say A Clockwork Orange. The problem here is not Upper West Siders unable to tear themselves from a tearjerker. No, I think the real problem is much more likely to be overly cynical film reviewers failing to take a Joel Grey tapdancing scene on its own, perfectly obvious, perfectly superficial, and perfectly fabulous merits. But I love the "gussied". Ties in nicely with the "meretricious". The "canned anti-American politics" is really the sort of thing which only a former New York Post leader-writer, espying reds under every bed, could ever see in this film. A Czech woman leaves her beloved homeland for the United States because only here can she get the necessary medical treatment for her son — treatment, incidentally, which is provided by a compatriot who presumably left for similar reasons. And what does this show? That’s right, the mercilessness of the American healthcare system. Huh? Selma makes a comment, which we never hear, about her still loving her homeland — this is 1964, remember — and the film is now anti-anti-communist. She makes another comment about Bill keeping his gun in the house, just because she is very concerned on the grounds he’s told her he’s thinking of killing himself. Presto, the film is anti-gun. She is unjustly hanged, and it’s anti death penalty. Well, I’ll grant you that it’s anti the death penalty, but there isn’t exactly a surfeit of films in favour. All films with the death penalty in them are against it, pretty much. And quite right too. The review even manages to imply that portraying musicals as "a kind of cultural opiate designed to distract people from dreadful reality" is somehow anti-American. I mean, I might have lost the scathing neo-realist subtext of Guys and Dolls, but isn’t that the whole point of Hollywood? The difference between the scenes in rapidly-deteriorating real life and those in Selma’s rich imagination is just that, Jonathan, it’s not an oblique swipe at the entire output of the American film industry. The rehearsals for The Sound of Music are shot lovingly; you can almost imagine them being dropped into an Alan Ayckbourne film. They’re not eviscerating a backwards community’s pathetic attempt to reproduce the glamour of Hollywood. The story "groans with cheap irony"? Once again, Jonathan, it’s a musical. All musicals groan with cheap irony, or at least use it. I don’t think this one groans: is it cheap when Bill pretends to shut the door behind him but stays instead in the trailer? It’s perfectly justifiable dramatic irony, I think: we see, quite literally, something our heroine can’t. You’ve simply decided that the film's irony is "groaning" just because you don’t like the film. "Unrelenting in its manipulative sentimentality?" I’ll give you that one, at least as far as the second half of the film is concerned. And, like you, I abjure such films, as a rule. But this is the exception. And the musical sequences being poorly performed and shot? That’s an interesting one. They certainly didn’t pack the punch of the ones we saw Selma enjoying so much in the cinema, or even the ones in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You. But at the same time, there was a rawness to them which nicely complemented Bjork’s singing voice. Personally, I could have done with a bit more polish, but what do you expect on a budget of $12 million? Even allowing for the fact that I've allowed myself much more space than you are given, I think my attitudes towards the film are more subtle than yours. I don’t rate it as highly as I do Breaking the Waves; on that we can agree. I do, however, rate it higher than Crime and Punishment in Suburbia, a forgettable teen flick notable only for some intermittently cool photography, to which you gave a higher rating. And yes, it’s even better than Gladiator, which you gave the highest rating of any recent film you’ve reviewed, and which is mainly notable for a great final performance from Oliver Reed and some CGI which probably cost more per sequence than all of Dancer put together. I guess I’m just confused about why Dancer is such a polarizing film. Everybody I know either loves it or hates it, with roughly equal amounts of vehemence on either side. Everybody but Amy, interestingly enough, who has a lot of good things to say about the film even if she giggled at the end. Maybe, in time, it’s going to turn out to be one of those films like Eyes Wide Shut, which with hindsight turn out not to be as bad as their detractors said, and not as great as their cheerleaders would have had them either. And maybe, like with Eyes Wide Shut, a lot of the negative reaction to Dancer is really a negative reaction to the hype that preceded it — enough, already of the hagiographies in the New York Times Magazine! Next time Lars von Trier releases a film, let it be a sleeper. |
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Let me know what you think; I'll post all comments here.
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