This examination of selfishness, xenophobia and the human ability to rationalize acts of horror may have audience members squirming not with outrage but recognition.
John Beifuss in Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)
Dogville quotes
Page 7 of 16Those awful figurines say more about the people in this town, than many words.
Tom
Next day the weather changed. The fog came rolling down from the mountains. And although there were no sunsets to be seen, McKay thought it best that she sat by him anyway. She had sat by Jack McKay so many times now, but Jack had not got better at judging the distance between them. On the contrary, where fingers alone had previously brushed her young flesh, now it was a hand that remained in place throughout the allotted span.
To call the mood of the audience at Tom's morale lecture in the mission house the next day "enthusiastic" would have been going too far — but they had come. And Tom had launched himself fearlessly into his endeavor to illustrate the human problem: to receive. The subject was obvious, but quite dreadfully ill-considered by this young man. To compensate for his lack of preparation Tom made diligent use of his technique of lashing out somewhat haphazardly in all directions.
It didn't help Grace that the first theft ever registered in Dogville had taken place the previous evening, when most people were assembled for the town meeting. Old Tom Edison Senior had had a considerable sum of money stolen from his medicine closet and suspicion soon fell on Grace, who had apparently been planning an escape that would surely require funding. Grace chose to remain silent in the face of these new charges.
Grace turned into the alley which went by the exotic name, Glunen Street to knock on the door of the blind — but only too vain — man.
You couldn't bring yourself to throw it away, could you? The number he gave you that night. You couldn't throw it away. I told you how dangerous that man was. That was stupid.
Grace
Imagine if Jesus Christ came to die for our sins only to discover we weren't worth the trouble.
Erik Childress at Efilmcritic.com
Surely we can offer her two weeks! And if after that time so much as one man cries out Be gone! — I promise I'll happily send her packing myself.
Tom
Grace had just started on the bed, which June had soiled yet again, when an irritating feeling of wasting her time forced itself upon her. And it was without thinking she then said the words: "Nobody gonna sleep here." She didn't say them out loud, but even so she was startled by the utterance that had urged itself upon her. Where had these ominous words come from?
Just as Dogville had done from its open, frail shelf on the mountainside, quite unprotected from any capricious storms, Grace, too, had laid herself open. And there she dangled from her frail stalk like the apple in the Garden of Eden. An apple so swollen that the juices almost ran. And once again the police had come to Dogville.
A stunning display of a filmmaker adventuring on the far side of what's possible.
Megan Lehmann in The New York Post
What Lars von Trier has achieved is avant-gardism for idiots. From beginning to end, Dogville is obtuse and dislikable, a whimsical joke wearing cement shoes.
David Denby in The New Yorker
Grace was the same and so was the town. That the gangsters had fixed to have charges made against Grace in their efforts to neutralize her came as no surprise. But everything had changed a little yet again.
Grace was no expert in exclusive automobiles, yet she recognized with no difficulty the sound of the vehicle that was rounding the corner from Canyon Road at that very moment. Alas, in Grace's memory the legendary purr of the Cadillac series 355 C was inextricably linked with another, rather less sophisticated sound: that of gunfire directed against her person.