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Jacobson highlights Lars von Trier's Dogville, a film concerned with the Church, which accomplishes one quite wonderful variation on his obsessive making-of-a-saint scenario. Proud of his ignorance about America, Trier attacks it at the heart--it is a land of second chances accorded people like Grace (Kidman)--and gets it wrong, as surely as he botched the system of justice in his Dancer in the Dark. Details of the movie's plot and casts are discussed.

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Ten years ago at Cannes, French director Alain Cavalier showed Libera Me, a 75-minute film shot on a plain set. The work is largely forgotten. It conjured up a family in crisis. The actors were on a bare stage. The rest was done with sound and light and voiceover. It was less a film than a lesson in semiotics; the imagery of the full story never appeared but was simply signified onscreen by the actors. It almost seemed like a French director's lampooning of the independent filmmaker's complaint: if there had only been more money in the budget....

The Piano and Farewell My Concubine shared the Palme d'Or that year, 1993. And Louis Malle was head of the jury. After the ceremony, I asked Malle about the decision. "Well, I liked Cavalier's film," Malle said. "But arguing for it was hopeless." So did I, though God knows it was way too inside-baseball-a meta-film, perhaps (as in I never meta-film I didn't like). Which was more or less Cavalier's point about late-20th-century visual literacy: we can fill in the blanks. In Libera Me, Cavalier had essentially used hand signals, as if in prison, to conjure something like a chapter of War and Peace and without spending for props or FX.

Thus has Danish bad-boy director Lars von Trier evolved from Dogme 95 and the hyped "reality" aesthetics of Breaking the Waves to the meta-film of Dogville, staged on a quasi-abstract theatrical set a la Cavalier, but somewhat more visually "compromised"-that is, accessible. To begin, the opening establishes a visual map of Dogville, a mythical Rocky Mountain town, shot from overhead. And there's help from props throughout. To ameliorate the three-hour range of Trier's ambitious mission, the story is broken into chapters narrated to harpsichord by John Hurt as if it were an 18th-century novel in the manner of Henry Fielding filmed by Tony Richardson. Only now Tom Jones has been replaced by Tom Edison, Jr., who's full of bright ideas but never delivers. And the film pauses regularly to let a cast of first-rate, serious actors led by Nicole Kidman, plus the not-so-serious but comical James Caan, advance the plot with blocked scenes of mostly symbolic action and fairy-tale dialogue.

As staged, Dogville is not precisely the polar opposite of Dogme 95's ambient "reality" principle-which the impish Trier has used as a huckster's tool to brand Danish cinema in the world marketplace as much as a new aesthetic compass. It's a variation on Dogme 95, an elevation of symbolism, this time stripping away the visual, paring it back to where tattered costuming and a few props-a black Model T police car, a Tom Joad pickup truck-will suffice to reinforce the notion that we are in Depression-era America. And the cast, if nothing else, is asked to engage in repetitive fetishizing over the opening and closing of imaginary doors to the town's half-dozen or so shops, residences, and the all-important church, all reduced to a few suggestive pieces of lumber on a chalk diagram.

To be sure, Dogville is concerned with the Church, but it first alights at the town mine, where Kidman's Grace hides out when she comes to town a fugitive. Trier's verite camera-which imports "reality" grammar to a soundstage-bares its mission in glancing at the inscription over the mine's entrance: Dictum ac factum. Said and done. That's the kind of town Dogville isn't. The only thing to mine here is layers of hypocrisy.

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Trier's worst tendency is his indulgence of his brand of modernist Catholicism. In that loony-bin brain of his-and who knows, he might be right-he means to declare the Papacy not exactly dead but relocated to Copenhagen, where a filmmaker now reigns over the True Church of Cinema. Whatever else Breaking the Waves was-an extravaganza of the demons and delights of a sexual idiot savant (more purely and dully realized in The Idiots, the next part of his "Golden Heart" trilogy), a headlong foray into sex, marriage, and faith-it didn't fully reveal its goal until its Catholic climax (a Trier habit, as it were), which, of course, changes everything. Trier pulled his camera away from the divine mechanics of Emily Watson's ascent to sainthood, with Katrin Cartlidge as witness, sending it heavenward to show bells in the sky ringing out his claim on the new Church.

In Dogville, Trier accomplishes one quite wonderful variation on his obsessive making-of-a-saint scenario. Grace (Kidman) comes as a supplicant to mythical America during the Depression, and the town does something particularly American: it commodifies her refuge until her cost-benefit ratio-i.e., yield versus risk-no longer works in the town's favor and then tosses her back to her pursuers. Proud of his ignorance about America, Trier attacks it at the heart-it is a land of second chances accorded people like Grace-and gets it wrong, as surely as he botched the system of justice in Dancer in the Dark. In its rather fabulous climax, which, true to form, changes everything, Dogville makes this story a saint's revenge. More exactly, it's the story of a woman who fails at sainthood and becomes an avenging angel. Humanity, it seems, at certain times of unfortunate empire, needs a swift kick in the nuts, Sodom-style, a lot more than the liturgy needs one more beatification, one more hanging of a woman out to dry for our sins-a Trier constant realized most deliciously in Dancer in the Dark, where, in Bjork, who believed the part called for her actual execution, Trier finally met someone crazier than himself.

The climactic scene between Kidman and Caan-who plays Mr. Big, her Mob boss dad, and a stand-in for God (in America, anyway)-is jarringly funny. Here, Dogville shifts from a sermon on the mount to a poker game in the hack of a limo. It's admirable in its perversity-the declaration of a true misanthrope, straight out of W.C. Fields's relationship to small children and dogs. In the slice-and-dice negotiations between Kidman and Caan, Trier's credo is rendered in the powerpoint jargon of urban professionals at home in the God business. Mr. Big and his rebellious saint talk turkey. Evincing the tolerant wisdom of his years in the job, he sees Grace's distemper and pricelessly arches his eyebrows: the good people of Dogville, he pleads, are no more accountable for their failings than dogs following their nature. Grace, character and quality, will have none of it. Underneath all the Beatrice or Therese toppings (typical of new kids reforming the rules), Grace is a hothead. Humanity, by which Trier means America, is a heartbreaker. Irredeemable, unworthy of a saint's sacrifice. So shoot 'em. As an example? Nah, as retribution. Payback's a bitch.

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Now, that's funny. Dark and funny. The only problem is there's a limited number of good folk comfortable living inside a neo-goth theology. At Cannes this year, European critics didn't think much of the film but grudgingly liked Trier's impudence at poking the U.S. in the eye. Americans shrugged off the idea that U.S. audiences wouldn't like the film for its politics, when there were 177 minutes of self-important twaddle to sleep through. At Toronto, whatever the political tea-leaf reading had been in Cannes didn't seem to matter, and the film got a fresh look by critics for its debt to Brecht. Later in New York, it slipped right by festival audiences that Trier had constructed an elaborate fairy tale in which Americans are wiped off the planet. The audience included. They clapped. Some cultures just deserve slaughter not sacrifice, Trier fantasizes with a renegade pope's sense of humor. Then he jump-cuts from the abstract stage to unleash a photomontage torrent of Americana: recognizable Walker Evans Depression-era images sliding into Sixties slum and civil-rights squalor, with an anti-Richard Nixon/George Bush patina of hipness all backed by David Bowie's "Young Americans" on the soundtrack. How Bruckheimer.

You could read the film as an update of Our Town, with Dogville as a universal. And God knows there are more than a few towns in France, Germany, and Poland-Denmark, actually, not so much-where humanity has let down the odd refugee or two. But Trier is clear: this is a Euro offensive, a celebration of the certainty of European moral superiority in the new century set in a mythic moment from the last, when the poverty of the Depression gave Americans their chance to learn the virtues of Christ-and flunked.

Somehow in his mental calculus Trier must have figured Dogville would crack the American market-English dialogue, Kidman, Colorado. He practically gave his star a tonsillectomy in Cannes getting her to swear in front of the press that she would complete two more films as part of a trilogy. A month later, clear of his death grip, Kidman backed out. Compared to losing Kubrick and Cruise, losing Lars is a no-brainer.

It may be true, as H.L. Mencken observed, that "no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." But it's not dictum ac factum.-HARLAN JACOBSON