Three years ago, Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier created quite a stir with his anti-American screed, Dogville, a three-hour endurance marathon of vitriol directed at capitalism, paternalism and plain old human nature, a film as much about the evils that lie in all human hearts as it was about any uniquely American ugliness. Dogville was the first part of a planned trilogy exploring von Trier's views on the U.S., and the second part, Manderlay, arrives with considerably less fanfare and a significant cast change. Nicole Kidman is out as Grace, the heroine of the series, replaced by the much younger Bryce Dallas Howard, who isn't able to offer the fierceness that Kidman brought to the part.
As the film opens, Grace and her gangster father (Willem Dafoe, replacing James Caan) have fled the tiny Colorado town of Dogville and are driving across the country with a caravan of thugs. They stop outside the titular Alabama plantation where Grace discovers, much to her dismay, that slavery is still being practiced even though it's 1933. Stepping in with righteous fury, Grace uses the threat of her father's guns to free the slaves and set up a new paradigm on the plantation, with each former slave granted part ownership and the white ruling family reduced to servants.
Grace institutes daily lessons to teach democracy to the former slaves, getting them to become self-reliant even if it requires force. Her most reliable ally is aging house slave Wilhelm (Danny Glover), clearly the most educated and erudite of the bunch, although that sophistication takes a dark turn at the film's end. On the other side is Timothy (Isaach de Bankolé), a proud African who'll have nothing to do with Grace's attempts to civilize Manderlay's inhabitants.
While Dogville was about the gross injustices visited upon Grace in the name of tolerance, Manderlay is about the injustices that Grace, who seems to have learned nothing from her harsh treatment in the first film, visits upon the slaves in the name of democracy. Von Trier took on capitalist greed and liberal paternalism in equal measure in Dogville, but Manderlay is more squarely aimed at the hypocrisy of limousine liberals whose attempts to "help" oppressed minorities are really just efforts to feel better about themselves.
It can also be disturbingly interpreted as a pro-slavery film, since the ultimate message is that everyone at Manderlay was much better off before Grace barged in and mucked things up. Von Trier's view of race relations in the U.S. is, not surprisingly, as fatalistic as his views on everything else: As far as he's concerned, blacks and whites will never coexist effectively, so the blacks might as well just remain slaves on plantations, or maybe ship themselves back to Africa. This coming from a pasty white Danish guy who's never been to America.
Once again, the film's characters are less people than ideas, but this time none of the actors are able to rise above the material. The rigid formalism of the set design (little more than outlines on a bare soundstage) is loosened a bit, but the power it had thanks to its startling newness in Dogville is lessened as well. Von Trier brings in more extensive sets, which serve more to highlight what is missing than to focus attention on the rigors of the film's message. Rumors are that the trilogy's third installment, Wasington, is on indefinite hold, and von Trier is indeed busy with an unrelated film. That's probably for the best, since Manderlay shows that his ideological bullying has run its course.