Manderlay

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Manderlay

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Manderlay

Bryce Dallas Howard, Chloë Sevigny, Danny Glover, Isaach De Bankolé, Issaach De Bankole

Manderlay lay on a lonely plain somewhere in the deep south of the USA. It was in the year of 1933 that Grace and her father had left the township of Dogville behind them. By chance their cars stop in...( read more  read more... ) the state of Alabama in front of a large iron gate bearing a thick chain and a padlock. Beside the gate, a dead oak tree towers over a heavy boulder with Manderlay hewn in monumental letters into the granite. Just as Grace, her father and his men are about to leave after a short break and a quick lunch, a young black woman runs up to the car. She knocks on Grace's window. She hammers at the glass in despair. Ignoring her father's advice to leave others to their own affairs, Grace follows the girl through the gates of Manderlay and there, she finds a group of people living as if slavery had not been abolished seventy years earlier, with white masters and black slaves. Grace believes that she has a duty to make it up to the slaves for injustices they have suffered at the hands of her kind: 'we brought them here, we abused them and made them what they are,' as she argues to her father, and she decides that having liberated Manderlay, she will remain at the plantation until she has seen them through their first harvest.

Id: 10891914

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Manderlay Recent Reviews
  • benjaminguilbert2
    February 10, 2008
    benjaminguilbert2
    One commonplace after another, after another, after another.
  • pier007
    June 30, 2007
    pier007
    Lars Von Trier repeats his famous and tedious Dogville formula. nevertheless, an interesting and thought-provoking microcosm.
  • twanUM
    April 5, 2007
    twanUM
    Lars von Trier's pessimism and hatred for the American way can be a real annoyance. I put up with it in Dogville because the storytelling was so good. His message is so heavy-handed here that I can't imagine anyone enjoying it anymore than you would an Anti-American lecture.
  • guttersnipe28
    December 12, 2006
    guttersnipe28
    The mid-point of Lars von Trier's 'American trilogy', Manderlay follows up Dogville in it's presentation of the hypocrisy of a fictional-but-it-most-certainly-could-be-real town in the good ol' US of A.
    Rather than another case of snide back-stabbing in such backwater towns, Man...( read more)derlay takes us (and Grace) to a small village in which slavery is still going ahead. Grace is quick to point out the error of everyone's ways here, even arguing her father's gangsters have more humanity, and her trust and optimism later prove to be here downfall.
    The sets are once again less than minimal, mostly rooms are defined by chalk outlinesm with occiasonal 'real pieces', such as a donkey powering a well. Though still powerful cinema, by its very nature lacks the innovation of the first, and thus the impact.
    Other flaws occur, such as Grace's recasting as Bryce Dallas Howard. Not that she gives a bad performance; she simply doesn't look like Kidman, nor does she have her screen prescence. Another issue is her sudden precociousness (at nights she lusts for a local 'black buck'), which seems implausible after her sexual torment in Dogville.
    The third act is a belter, though, ably illustrating von Trier's true colours with some pitch-perfect, arguably por-slavery humanistic drama.
    Imperfect, but powerful.
  • HenrikSchunk
    August 1, 2009
    HenrikSchunk
    Lars von Trier is a master filmmaker, this can hardly be argued. Everything else aside, the way he uses the set and ligthning and directs his actors in Dogville and Manderlay is haunting and a feast for every film connoisseur.

    Yet, the "stories" of his films vary so much you ...( read more)cannot talk about his oeuvre in total. Dogville and Manderlay differ from his Dogma movies and all of these again very much from his Swedish movies.

    Manderlay explores another episode of American history/life, yet the focus dwindles between the fate of slaves in general and (which has always been Trier's prior interest), the question of good and bad, morals, decisions and fate.

    While I very much enjoyed this movie, I think it is a questionable decision to make a movie that singular in likeliness and subjective in opinion, but yet make it all part of an triolgy called "America", which supposedly portraits aspect of American history. The movie is utterly anti-American or anti-West for that matter, anti-capitalism and anti-human in general, as there is not one "good" person in the movie.

    Yet, one cannot deny that Trier's portrayal of humanity and humans is more realistic than many other. The division between good and bad, right and wrong cannot be made in reality and not a lot of moviemakers dare to speak out that truth in their movie and make each of their characters ambigious and ultimately human. The human nature is ambigious, paradox and neither good nor bad.

    Of course, this makes the movie not easy to digest as it is both disturbing as well as shockingly truthful which might put people off that already surrendered to the simpleness of mainstream cinema.

    A brilliant movie with an extraordinary cast except for a very disappointing Bryce Dallas Howard in the lead. The Anglo-African cast is very strong and intense, so is Danny Glover.

    Highly Recommended !
  • rpederson1
    December 7, 2009
    rpederson1
    Not as solid as Dogville, but fascinating nevertheless.
  • spiralrayonshorts
    October 1, 2009
    spiralrayonshorts
    Not nearly as impressive as DOGVILLE
  • Abzurdoh
    September 12, 2009
    Abzurdoh
    Lars von Trier es un GRAN director, sin duda alguna. Pero esta pelicula tiene sus ventajas y desventajas: primero, el recurso utilizado en Dogville funciono excelentemente bien, pero como Peter Brook dijo en uno de sus libros, un recurso repetido no funciona como la vez primera, ...( read more)y tampoco tendra el exito que pudo haber tenido el primer intento. Tal cual, siento que esto fue lo que paso con Manderlay... aun teniendo claras diferencias con Dogville, sigue siendo la base de la idea. Segundo, tiene un gran guion que desafortunadamente no pudo haberse llevado a cabo de otra manera, por lo que entro en un estado de confusion y contradiccion considerablemente preocupante (ja). Gran direccion y actuacion, es una pelicula que el director, como siempre, tiene algo que decir. Recomendable para los fanaticos del cine alternativo, de arte o experimental (como quieran llamarlo) o fans inevitables de Lars; aquellos que les costo trabajo entrar en el mundo de Dogville, abstenganse.
  • Homerisagod
    July 15, 2009
    Homerisagod
    i'd rather eat poison than watch this!
  • helwigs
    June 8, 2009
    helwigs
    PRobably a lot of people won't be able to get past the fact that they are all acting as if it were really a stage play, but It was really good.
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