Dig that freaky symbolism!
Manderlay (2006)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:25
Fresh:8
Rotten:17
Average Rating:4.4/10
Consensus: Manderlay may work better as a political statement than as a film, making its points at the expense of telling a compelling story.
Runtime: 2 hrs 19 mins
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release:Jan 27, 2006 Limited
Synopsis: This is the strange, disturbing story of the Manderlay plantation. 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... This is the strange, disturbing story of the Manderlay plantation. 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. Grace's father and his army of villains had spent the entire winter seeking out new hunting grounds in vain, and now they were heading south in one last attempt to find a favourable location in which to take up residence. By chance their cars stop in 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. Her father grudgingly leaves her with four henchmen and a lawyer, warning Grace that he won't be there to pick up the pieces when her plans for the resurrection of Manderlay fall apart... --© IFC Films [More]
Starring: Bryce Dallas Howard, Isaach de Bankolé, Danny Glover, Willem Dafoe
Starring: Bryce Dallas Howard, Isaach de Bankolé, Danny Glover, Willem Dafoe, Michael Abiteboul, Lauren Bacall, Jean-Marc Barr, Udo Kier, John Hurt, Chloe Sevigny
Director: Lars von Trier
Director: Lars von Trier
Screenwriter: Lars von Trier
Producer: Vibeke Windelov
Studio: IFC Films
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Reviews for Manderlay
If von Trier can't be bothered to get out more, he should at least consider picking up a book or just using some real imagination.
Manderlay comes off as little more than a droning, embittered curiosity.
It's a movie with more surprising things to say than most about racism past and present.
The trouble is the angrier it gets, the more infuriatingly banal it becomes.
Even the basic look of the film -- it was filmed on a stage with every shot set against a bleak, dark backdrop -- underscores the filmmaker's position as master manipulator, in a laboratory, looking down at his mice running through his maze.
Some will see Manderlay as thought-provoking and representative of the way the rest of the world sees us. If that's the case, then we're really in trouble.
The crucial difference between Manderlay and the almost unbearable Dogville is not that his politics have changed, but that his sense of mercy for the audience has been awakened.
Von Trier may not be completely right, but he certainly isn't all wrong.
It is without exaggeration one of the most blindingly boring films I've seen in years.
Manderlay is pompously didactic from the first of its 133 long minutes -- a harsh and endlessly schematic morality tale in which diatribe is mistaken for story.
It can become tiresome to watch von Trier bash the United States while realizing that he doesn't have a full understanding of what he's attacking.
Von Trier, there's no doubt about it, has become a taxidermist of America's sins, but the way he puts those sins on display only to thumb his nose at them marks him as a new style of prankster-hypocrite.
I am glad that [Von Trier] exists, to decry our sins, but, with another sequel to come (Manderlay is the centerpiece of a trilogy), I am even gladder that he is one of a kind.
Another ridiculous anti-American screed by the minimalist Danish director Lars von Trier, who has never set foot in this country.
Set in Alabama in 1933, the movie lays out an excoriating examination of the legacy of slavery in the United States.
As clumsy and ham-fisted as the movie's narrative process may be, its conclusion, however mordant or unforgiving, can't quite be shaken off so easily.
Controversy comes as naturally to Danish director Lars von Trier as breathing, and he'll use any means to achieve his goal.
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