In Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, Von Trier introduces holy-fool-innocents who are grace personified... grace taken advantage of... grace abused and violated and humiliated and ultimately killed. Grace draws out affection from people at first, but ultimately, the more gracious she is, the more wicked her friends and neighbors become until she is crucified.

And here's the story again, this time on a theater stage instead of in harsh realism or musical surrealism.

Von Trier twisted the knife with a sort of wicked glee in those two films, having very little to say except "Look at how EVIL men can be, and look at how these beautiful symbolic women know NO END of suffering!"

Here, he tells the same story again, but with more restraint, less of that sense of sadism. The similarities were SO similar that I was just exasperated with boredom. Why must he lavish so much directorial genius on the same dang story over and over again? The town turns against grace with the same astonishing lack of reason that we saw in that laughably implausible courtroom in Dancer in the Dark.

And again Grace is duped into "loving" the townspeople in unspeakable ways, debasing herself to do inappropriate things without resistance in the name of "sympathy." It is this and this specifically that tells me Von Trier does not understand the ideas of godly love and grace. This is where I part ways with his interpretation of the way people treat true love and the way that true love is shown.

But then... then... suddenly... in the final minutes... the movie is transformed. I sat bolt upright when I realized that THIS time the martyr wasn't going to just march right into her death. This time, the movie was going to go farther. And boy howdy. It's ABOUT something this time. Instead of just contempt for humankind and its depravity, this film is about how God responds to it, or should respond. Von Trier introduces a brilliant debate between the Old Testament God and the God of the New Testament... a debate between Law and Grace.

He also bemoans the ineffectiveness of art and the life of the mind, showing its impotence in saving the world. Tom, I believe, is Von Trier himself... seeing the depravity, but falling victim to it himself, even as he finally discovers that his method of "illustration" fails to awaken the consciences of his neighbors. So, implicating himself in humanity's guilt, he has himself executed in the end.

Ultimately, Von Trier concludes that yes... the Law exists to show us how we all fall short of what God calls us to be. But he also concludes... and here's the real tragedy... that GRACE only ends up achieving the same thing. It is abused, taken advantage of, and refuses to wake us up or redeem us in any way. In the end, both Christ (or Grace) and the God of Judgment throw up their hands in despair of humankind.

It's a brilliant finale that kicks life into the rather over-long film. It's also another feather in Von Trier's cap as far as his directorial creativity. He's a genius who is hitting us over the head with a sledgehammer yet again... but this time, hitting us just hard enough so that we have something to think about, where the other films beat us senseless with visions of depravity. Whereas the previous two films felt like brilliant bile, this one feels like a giant step forward. Now, I can't wait to see what he does next. Now we're getting somewhere.

And Kidman has never been more perfectly cast. She has always had this slight weakness as an actress... There's always this quality in her performance that keeps us aware she is "performing." It's this sort of over-eagerness in her intensity. And thus, here, she's perfect, because her character *is* performing the whole time... playing out a role... and Kidman's work leads us to a slight uneasiness about her. Through the whole film, I sensed a duplicity in Grace, that she was not really a gift, but that she was a test.

And BINGO... there is the problem. Lars Von Trier sees grace as another test of our ability to respond. In his world, grace was never truly a free gift. We failed to respond appropriately, and thus God has proven his point... that we deserve hellfire.