Kidman's goodness

If you have stars like Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara and James Caan, what do you need scenery for? Lars von Trier decided he didn't.

The result, Dogville, is a three-hour movie that bemused rather than uplifted audiences, though the stars and their director got prolonged ovations - more for their bravery in performing this ironic fable about virtue being its own comeuppance.

It opens in a small town in 1930s Depression-era America - only you can't see the place. The "town" and its streets, houses and vegetation are all represented by chalked lines on a flat studio floor the size of a football pitch, with bits and pieces of exterior and interior buildings - a suspended church spire, a token picket fence - and sound effects indicating where doors and windows are.

Though it is unusual to see

such minimalism in a star-laden film, it is far from innovative. Dozens of Expressionist plays were produced in the 1930s in just such a frugal manner. The voice-over narrator telling us who folks are is familiar from Thornton Wilder's Our Town, to name but one of von Trier's sources. Another is Friedrich Durrenmatt's play The Visit, about the world's richest woman offering her natal village a fortune for the head of the man who done her wrong.

Nicole Kidman, as Grace, arrives in Dogville in black fox fur, but rich she is not; she is seeking asylum from her gangster husband. What she very definitely is, is pure. Grace looks and behaves so innocently, pleads her case for refuge so successfully, that the townsfolk hide her from the police and her husband's hoodlums, who pin "Wanted" notices to the props.

All the characters move like actors blocking in their roles at rehearsal and represent various states of small-town folksiness. Grace fits in perfectly and everyone loves her: she teaches school, cares for the ailing, inspires a wouldbe writer, makes herself indispensable. But gradually the mood changes. Her sheer goodness becomes too much for the townsfolk, who turn critical and crabby. Grace now has to contend with the resentment of residents who realise the place has become too dependent on her sheer goodness. They shackle her to a length of chain and call in the hoodlums. The moral seems to be: one's own ideals are hard to live up to, but even harder for other people to live with.

In the last act, Grace exacts a terrible revenge on the place and its people.

Dogville is an art-house film with an "A" class star. That oddity is its single main selling pitch. Kidman has never lacked the courage to perform in innovative productions on stage and screen, such as The Blue Room and Eyes Wide Shut. In this film, which is a bit of both, she acquits herself gamely.