Dancer in the Dark

The pop star Bjork, sweet as a sugarcube, plays a factory worker suffering from the encroachment of hereditary blindess, and suffering further by toiling to pay for eye surgery for her 12-year-old son. Her only succor is music, mainly in the form of escapist daydreams that erupt, on screen, into dance numbers. In Dancer in the Dark, director Lars von Trier seems unashamed of horsewhipping his audience with mawkishness — exploitative emotional bombast that spoils the subtleties of honest feeling. His talent for wrapping us up in sadness is profound, which makes it all the sadder that this wrenching movie is a failed masterpiece.