Dear Wendy (2005)

“Dick” (Jamie Bell) finds a gun. “Dick” hates guns. “Dick” decides to name his gun and start a gang of “Dandies” in her honour. What’s the one rule of gun club? Nobody is ever allowed to fire their weapon. They can be looked at, they can be polished, they can even be traded - but under no circumstances nor despite any provocation can they ever be fired in anger. Meantime, the sheriff “Krugsby” (Bill Pullman) takes a tolerant view of these lads. He knows they are just boys being boys and that “Dick” is an harmless individual. Then something altogether unplanned happens, and well let’s just say that Thomas Vinterburg and Lars von Trier now take a leaf from the book of Robert Burns. “The best laid plans…”. Now what’s the message? There are some thinly veiled racial undertones and it is clearly having a poke at American gun culture, but to what end? Is it sending up the imbecility of those legally permitted to hold guns in this dead-end mining town? Is the very fact this town is nowhere near anywhere a symbol of an old nation that has moved on from it’s “Wild West” days? Is it just a satirical look at an inherently violent culture that doesn’t really come out so well as these scenarios are exaggerated and verbalised? Maybe none of them, maybe all of them - and the fact that it’s fronted by a Brit who sports a particularly weak accent can’t be ignored either. None of it really comes across as real, yet so much of it does - or might, if you’re minded to accept one of it’s many ambiguous premises. Bell is on solid, if unspectacular, form here as is Pullman but it’s really the supporting cast of his pacifist pals partnered with a sparing but quite purposeful script and some quirky photography that gives this whole film an almost sci-fi sense of the surreal. At no point was I convinced that any of this was ever meant to portray something real or true and as the denouement approached, all that was actually missing was Gary Cooper and Ennio Morricone. I didn’t love this, but bizarrely I don’t really know quite why. Maybe that’s why you ought to watch it?