So I saw the trailer for the film a while back and checked it out thinking it was a pretty neat idea for a film. I was let down, however by the supreme lack of intelligent conversation within the film itself. The idea for a film about the fetishism of guns and the failure of and ideal is something that could've been nice if well executed. I mean, the dandies with music by the zombies... that's just bad ass. However, the few stylized moments in the film are not well integrated into the structure of the film at all, first off. The narration by Jamie Bell is completely unconvincing, the story-line is ridiculously clichéd and pretty inconsequential in the end. It's an interesting discussion, but an unnecessarily facile one in this film. Von Trier's aggravation with the 'America' as represented by the second amendment right to bear arms is constantly present, as the film attempts to render such regard for power etc... a completely outdated and useless ideal, whether the straight-up naming of the pistols Lee and Grant or Bell's character being placed between a Confederate and American flag (both faded on the side of a barn), the discussion is heavy-handed and in the end fairly uninteresting. And when the film does try to pull off the cool, it's so rigid and (again) clichéd that it just comes off as film school jackassery. None of the characters are very well-developed, instead depending on the all-too overstated plot to carry the film. When viewed as a metaphor for the Dogme 95 film movement though, the film could possibly take on a different meaning. The good intentions of this new discipline (owning and caring for a gun), the vow of chastity, the pay-offs with the new discipline, but the eventual decay and ironic use of the very thing held so highly against them... Maybe that's shallow, but I think that it could possibly be more universally a statement on the hypocrisy of or cycle of the ideal taking over and turning on it's own principles in the end. I'm not sure that that makes the film any better but it's more interesting than the over-worn gun violence idea... to me at least.
Review of Dear Wendy
