6) The Sunset Limited
The Sunset Limited is an original play by legendary author Cormac McCarthy. It involves one man – Black – attempting to talk another, suicidal man – White – into finding the point of living, having just prevented him from leaping into the path of an oncoming train. It all takes place in Black’s apartment, as he talks deep with White, who’s determined to die and – before that – help Black see the futility of staying alive.
This is heavy, heavy stuff, full of the kind of philosophical musings that made The Counselor such a turn-off for some. Helpfully, you have two contemporary titans of American cinema – Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson – to ease the passage of this dark treatise on existence. It’s two men talking around a dinner table in the center of Black’s apartment, yes; but when those two men are Jones and Jackson, the conversation becomes unbelievably involving.
5) Dogville
Lars von Trier asks you to use your imagination in Dogville, a film set inside a large theater space with chalk outlines representing individual houses in an old American mining town. It’s a neat setup for a film, one that could probably only have come from the warped/pretentious/brilliant mind of Denmark’s premier maverick: as the citizens go about their lives indoors in ‘private,’ we see everything out in the open.
Seeing how this is Lars von Trier, citizens ‘going about their lives’ involves a bit of the old sexual and psychological abuse and slavery, culminating in an act of genocide. Still, it’s not all fun and games: Dogville also makes a comment on poverty and exploitation, delivering a strongly anti-US message before it’s through.
An ordeal, to say the least – no wonder Nicole Kidman and Paul Bettany never wanted to work with von Trier again.