REVIEWED - DEAR WENDY: The latest festival of finger-wagging, Brechtian pantomime and Yank-bashing from the pen of Lars von Trier concerns itself with the ways gun ownership can transform a personality.
Set in a western town during times a little like our own, Dear Wendy follows the adventures of Dick, a miner's son, too sensitive and introspective to follow dad down the pit. Jamie Bell, who plays the hero with a pitch-perfect American accent, must surely have thought of Billy Elliot when he scanned the script, but he pushes aside memories of that northern lad with an intense, enigmatic performance that should secure his reputation as a mature actor.
Reduced to working in a supermarket, Dick gains a kind of self-worth after happening upon an antique revolver. The boy's evangelical fervour for the holy firearm, which he christens Wendy, is communicated to the town's other young outsiders who join with him in forming their own secret society.
Listening to The Zombies with the same enthusiasm that the Droogs in A Clockwork Orange devoted to Beethoven, The Dandies, armed pacifists in cloaks and fedoras, regard their guns as more than comforting fetishes, more even than beloved friends. They are bits of their soul recast as weapons.
This is all very interesting, but what exactly does it have to do with the real world? The combination of mysticism and Byronic foppishness that fuels the Dandies' meetings is, as far as I can judge, not something you encounter at National Rifle Association conventions. If, on the other hand, von Trier is seeking to remind us of the gothic loners who perpetrated the Columbine massacre then, rather than having the (reassuringly evil) police trigger the shoot out, he should really allow the Dandies to fire the first shot.
What exactly is Lars trying to say? Somehow the obscurity of the message doesn't really matter. Thomas Vinterberg, director of Festen, brings greater vivacity to this odd fable than von Trier managed in his own fascinating, flawed Dogville. Filmed in beautiful gloom by the Danes' regular collaborator, Anthony Dod Mantle, Dear Wendy gradually takes on the quality of a claustrophobic, drugged-up western. It is fun in spite of itself.
(I suppose von Trier would expect me to feel troubled and divided by my enjoyment of the elegantly slow gunfight that closes the film. He can expect whatever he likes.)
