*½/****
starring Jamie Bell, Bill Pullman, Michael Angarano, Danso Gordon
screenplay by Lars von Trier
directed by Thomas Vinterberg
by Bill Chambers It's a classic catch-22: Dear Wendy reveals that Jamie Bell was born to play Billy the Kid, but it probably also squanders his chances of doing so. As Dick, the orphaned son of a miner, Bell dons Michael J. Fox's effeminate cowboy duds from Back to the Future Part III and transforms the town's social lepers into a gang of gun fetishists known collectively as the Dandies; director Thomas Vinterberg and screenwriter Lars von Trier give us the gay burlesque version of the NRA, because nothing sticks it to the red states like calling them a bunch of queers. Other low blows: Dick has a mammy (I'm now officially dreading the forthcoming Manderlay, von Trier's slavery-themed sequel to Dogville); the token girl (Canadian dynamo Alison Pill) with the nice rack seems most attracted to the token black criminal (Canadian dynamo Denso Gordon); and Dick's girlfriend, for all intents and purposes, is a revolver–the titular Wendy. At the core of Dear Wendy is a surprisingly airtight allegory of how pacifism is by nature a fallacy in a country (the U.S., natch) saturated with firearms, but as usual, the sheer audacity of von Trier and his formalist puppet Vinterberg–both as exploitation filmmakers and as satirists basing their image of the States on assumption rather than experience–hijacks the discussion. Like the creators of "South Park", everything they make is ultimately a vanity project. PROGRAMME: Contemporary World Cinema
