'DEAR WENDY' MISSES TARGET.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

AMERICANS AND GUNS. Yes, it's a complicated relationship.

Too complicated, apparently, for the Danish filmmakers behind ``Dear Wendy'' to address it in a credible fashion. This allegory about alienated young people who love their firearms to death is so mannered and pretentious that any worthwhile insights it may possess end up shot full of holes.

Lars von Trier, who directed the controversial but often trenchant ``Dogville'' and ``Dancer in the Dark,'' wrote the script. Director Thomas Vinterberg made the best of the austere Dogme films, ``The Celebration.''

Together, they've come up with a pistol fetish picture that is very, very hard to take seriously. Even more so because practically every aspect of it is so humorless.

``Dear Wendy'' is set in a grungy Southern mining town called Estherslope. The main protagonist and narrator - yes, he's writing a love letter to the gun he named Wendy - is Dick Dandelion. Kind of like the character Jamie Bell played in his other mining town movie ``Billy Elliot,'' Dick is too delicate to work in the shafts. He teams up with the town's other young losers to form the Dandies, a secret society of shooters who dress in 19th-century garb, conduct eccentric rituals in their underground ``temple'' and profess their pacifism while becoming more ballistically knowledgeable than your average Navy SEAL.

The Dandies' happy reverie is upset when local cop Krugsby (Bill Pullman, attempting a Dixie accent only a Scandinavian would buy) makes Dick the probation guardian for a young killer. Sebastian (Danso Gordon), who is African-American, rightly thinks the Dandies are whack. But he's a good shot and the group's lone girl member (Alison Pill) finds Sebastian sexy.

This upsets Dick enough. But when Sebastian breaks the club's cardinal rule and shoots Dick's true love better than her owner, well ... Well, what? Dick doesn't like it, but what, other than something stereotypically racist, is that supposed to represent?

I ask because the whole movie represents a notion that, no matter how advanced and peaceful a society may imagine itself, if weapons give its members confidence, they will inevitably spill blood with them.

That's not a dubious notion, but it isn't argued convincingly here. The movie is better at capturing the peculiar euphoria of young people who create their own, hermetic culture. Music by the '60s band the Zombies plays a big role, but to what end it's hard to say. And the amazing cinematographer of ``Celebration'' and ``Dogville,' Anthony Dod Mantle, shot the movie as a kind of celebration of smudge.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

DEAR WENDY - Two stars

(Not rated: violence, nudity, language, racism)

Starring: Jamie Bell, Bill Pullman, Danso Gordon, Alison Pill, Novella Nelson.

Director: Thomas Vinterberg.

Running time: 1 hr. 40 min.

Playing: Nuart, West L.A.; University 6, Irvine.

In a nutshell: A couple of pretentious Danes try to say something about Americans' destructive interest in guns and laughably fail.

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Photo:

Jamie Bell, center, plays a delicate young man who forms a secret band of costumed gun lovers in ``Dear Wendy.''