Manderlay, directed by Lars von Trier, is a weird sequel to his also weird Dogville (2003). After leaving Dogville in 1933, Mulligan (played by Willem Dafoe) drives his daughter Grace (now played by Bryce Dallas Howard) to the Deep South. When they stop briefly, Grace is outraged by what she sees inside a gated plantation--muscular Timothy (played by Isaach De Bankolé) is tied up and whipped for misconduct. Soon, she witnesses the death of the whipper, plantation Mam (played by Lauren Bacall), the bosslady of Manderlay, where African Americans have been kept in slavery despite the fact that involuntary servitude was abolished in 1866. Von Trier perhaps has decided to bring to life a famous statement of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that sometimes people have to be forced to be free. Grace, as self-appointed liberator, decides to stay at the plantation in order to liberate the former slaves. Since her task will take time, she asks her father to return in a week to pick her up when the job is over. The next part of the film, which has captioned chapters, is a boring exercise with sardonic voiceovers in which Grace shows African Americans how to manage their own lives, though she fails to appreciate the wisdom of Black overseer Wilhelm (played by Danny Glover) that voluntary servitude provided an equilibrium to the illiterate, unskilled Blacks. When Mulligan returns, she is busy inside, having changed the clock by majority vote to a time before he is to appear, and she is marooned when the story ends. However, the film ends with a series of pictures of the condition of Blacks in the United States, presumably an indictment of American racism, then and now. For most American filmviewers, the indictment will seem a strange caricature of a faux Michael Moore documentary. Whatever von Trier was trying to accomplish ends as an amateurish statement by a Kierkegaardian who has never visited the United States. He joins in bad taste the derogatory cartoonist of a fellow Dane who has provoked Muslims to riot. If von Trier is trying to analogize Grace's foolishness with President George Bush's effort to liberate Iraq, the message is lost in the historical anachronisms and indeed the defense of slavery by Wilhelm. MH
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