Von Trier's vision as cruel as Gibson's
The object of the people's scorn limps from station to station, bloodied and battered by humankind's evil. A hush falls over the movie theater as the audience is moved to tears at the holiness of the victim and the reprehensibility of the victimizers.
Those two sentences could apply to Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" and to the true believers who come to see it. But it could also apply to Lars von Trier's "Dogville" and his art-house adherents.
The movies appeal primarily to different audiences -- conservative Christians and the liberal intelligentsia -- and most members of each contingent would have a tough time sitting through the other's movie.
That shouldn't be surprising, given the polarity in the country's culture wars, but it is nevertheless amusing, as the movies are almost mirror images of each other aesthetically.
We all know Gibson's view of life at the beginning of the first millennium. Jesus offered up salvation to the Jews who, after they beat him, try to persuade the nice Roman boss, Pontius Pilate, to crucify him. Some of you may not know von Trier's view of life at the beginning of the third millennium. Nicole Kidman offers up salvation to a townful of people who, after they rape and enslave her, try to sell her off to a nice mob boss, who they think will shoot her.
And who are the Jews in von Trier's movie? Why, shucks, it's those corn-fed, salt-of-the-earth middle Americans, the same ones who populate the folk art of everyone from Thornton Wilder and Norman Rockwell to John Mellencamp.
Von Trier, true, doesn't go in for the same sadomasochistic flagellation of Gibson, and there is an interesting enough thesis to his story -- that Americans are so smug about their innate goodness that they can't see the evil that they're capable of. But deep down, Gibson and von Trier are cut from the same artistic cloth, and the fabric, though dazzling to their true believers, is really very thin.
The first problem is dialectic. Neither director is capable of building an argument based on logic. To stigmatize the Jews, Gibson needs to make Pilate into a good guy. Forget that by almost every historical and religious standard, Pilate was the man responsible for Jesus's death.
But is von Trier any better? In the first part of the movie Kidman wanders around town romanticizing the folks' small-town goodness after they had hidden her from the mob. She repays them by helping the blind to see (well, read) and the sick to get well. So why do they turn on her? The Danish filmmaker is so eager to demonize Americans that he never builds a case. That's just what Americans do -- enslave people, exploit workers, sell people out.
Some of the townspeople are tricked or bribed into turning on her and others are merely jealous or lustful, but there's really not much motivation for their actions. Von Trier can point to Iraq as evidence of the evil that America does under the guise of goodness, but he's still obliged to make a movie with internal logic, not just ideological finger-pointing.
Gibson favors a straightforward narrative to tell his story while von Trier's minimalistic sets recall those of Wilder's "Our Town," with the town's buildings reduced to chalk outlines. Both movies start out visually enticing but as both directors eschew cinematic effect, they both become soporific (though most viewers of "The Passion" are closing their eyes for other reasons). The lack of strong visual storytelling may be neither here nor there to their fans, but there's not much for the rest of us to hold onto.
But what really unites the two filmmakers, and their camps, is the mistaken belief that piling on abuse after abuse amounts to storytelling power. You could say the same about Jerzy Kosinski's novel "The Painted Bird" or even the Afghani film "Osama." That movie, at least, takes us into a world we don't know well and has a central character whose plight is legitimately symbolic of that country's victimization by the Taliban.
Von Trier and Gibson, meanwhile, just keep upping the ante on how low humanity can go, coming up for air only long enough to dive down even further. But there's is no artistry in piling on. There has to be something else.
To mine the dark side of the street to full artistic effect takes an artist who has something to say, and who knows how to say it with style and force. Roman Polanski's movies, such as "The Pianist," certainly do it. Martin Scorsese at his best does too.
But "The Passion of the Christ" and "Dogville" go about their task with a -- pardon the term -- messianic message that is the opposite of real art. Put these guys together and what you essentially come away with is "Freddy vs. Jason."
Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.
