E-Mail This Article to a Friend DEAR WENDY

100 MINUTES | KENDALL SQUARE

Scripted by Lars von Trier and directed by Thomas Vinterberg, Dear Wendy seems at first a cliché’d anti-American screed from a couple of know-nothing Danes. But when Wendy’s identity is revealed, things get interesting. She’s the addressee of letters from Dick (Jamie Bell), a self-proclaimed pacifist in an average American town who narrates the tale in his sometimes intrusive epistolary voiceovers. Recognizing that he’s a loser, Dick organizes the other neighborhood misfits into a gang called the Dandies; they hold meetings in a mine shaft, wear hippie garb, and listen to the music of the ’60s band the Zombies. More to the point are the guns — vintage items to which each Dandy is betrothed and which they are forbidden to fire outside the confines of the club. When a black ex-con joins the group, the Dandies’ non-violent empowerment is questioned, and the film uncoils into a black comedy about youth, guns, race, and macho fetishism. It’s a poisoned-pen letter that shows Trier at his perverse best.