2013 Muriels: 10th Anniversary Award for Best Film of 2003

This year, there were two races that went absurdly down-to-the-wire. This was the less close of the two of them. (The other is still to come. Oooh, excitement!) Also, I might be just a touch biased, but I feel the voting body squeaked out the right winner here. Good job, guys.

Third place:



Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino) [124 points / 19 votes]

Second place:



Lost in Translation [130 points / 20 votes]

And your winner...



Dogville [132 points / 19 votes]

""I think you have plenty to offer Dogville."

Lars Von Trier is a cruel filmmaker. In an oeuvre filled with inhumane acts and painful sacrifices, Dogville (a film I consider, in no small words, an unassailable masterpiece) may be his cruelest barb – a hunting knife in the gut, slowly plunged in and then messily and violently twisted for what seems forever. In telling the story of Grace (Nicole Kidman), a woman systematically taken advantage, abused, raped and reduced to nothing by the residents of the title Depression-era small mountain town, Von Trier looks to be picking right back up where his Golden Heart suffering-women trilogy left off – indeed, spinning out the most despairing, most pitiless variation on this formula wherein an avatar of infinite patience is ground to the nub time and again until an after-the-fact reward is hard-won. The lead’s symbolically significant first name certainly seems to promise this too – something like a more-together Bess, demonstrating the doctrine of Stoicism through the misery as best she can and waiting for the pealing of bells to signal her deliverance. But that’s not how it goes this time.

"...as if the dog was standing face to face with a force to be taken seriously."

Instead, Grace meets with her father (or her Father, to indulge the obvious reading), the man she was attempting to escape at the film’s outset, and the town of Dogville finds out, in an eruption of great vengeance and furious anger, exactly who they had been harboring all this time. While the finale is one hell of a sucker punch the first time out, multiple viewings reveal the seeds Von Trier plants along the way to set the stage. (Vera’s line about crying too easily, in retrospect, provokes a vicious frisson.) Moses tries to warn them, but they prefer to listen to Tom Edison Jr. (The Age of Enlightenment steamrolls Old-World religion, and a town pays for progress in every possible way.) The Brechtian bare stage, in this light, gains a hideous irony (happily accentuated by John Hurt’s invaluable, sarcasm-drenched narration): the involved can see everyone else, know everyone else’s business and whisper everyone else’s secrets, but they can’t see the truth of what’s in their midst until it’s too late for them. Consider it a splintered stake in the Golden Heart.

“It's quite a blow to me to see all my friends acting so... uncivilized.”

What to make of poor dithering young Tom, anyway? Despite Kidman’s name above the line and Grace being the figure around whom the story revolves, there’s an argument to be made that Paul Bettany’s Tom is the central character, or at least the most important. At the outset, it’s clear he’s meant as a straw-man stand-in for the ineffectual hectoring college liberal type, a man of many ideals and beliefs and little worldly experience to back up those ideals. But as he goes on about “illustrations” and “moral re-armament” and using Grace to prove something he knows – knows for sure! – about human nature, the straw grows thorns. Tom talks the townspeople into accepting Grace, into “allowing” her to earn her keep so that she can prove herself useful, into acclimating themselves to seeing her as someone forever in their debt for the act of keeping her safe. Then he hangs back and allows this to metastasize into slavery, all in the name of Teaching a Lesson. In short, he is responsible for molding Grace as needed into the subject of a narrative much the same as Lars did to Bess and Karen and Selma. Michael Sicinski gets into this far better and far richer than I’m capable of, but when Tom confesses, “I used you, and I’m sorry,” at the end, it’s hard not to hear Lars trying and failing to exonerate himself for similar crimes.

"That’s what I want to use the power for, if you don’t mind. I want to make the world a little better."

Therein lies the true cruelty of Dogville – it’s a great gleaming mantrap of a film, one meant to push us to expect one thing and hope for another, then give us what we hope for while still making the catharsis feel like sickness and horror. The blunt critique of America’s treatment of its underclass is the easy reigning metaphor in Dogville (and the use of images from American Pictures by Jacob Holdt – another Dane! – under the closing credits certainly drives that home), but four viewings in, what sticks with me is the self-incriminating admissions of arrogance and inadequacy and self-interest and complicity – indeed, the terror that your or my best, while not monstrous like the residents of Dogville, may actually not be good enough. Rather than another stoic saint, Von Trier buries an Old-Testament land mine in his gooseberry garden and waits for us all – the Dogvillians, the audience and himself – to plant our hob-nail boot directly on top of it. Lars Von Trier is a cruel man. And he knows it. That knife is ultimately in his gut as well." -- Steve Carlson

See the full results.