PAUL BETTANY, UNLEASHED 'DOGVILLE' STAR SINKS HIS TEETH INTO A NEW CHALLENGE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Paul Bettany stands out. And not just because the 6-foot-3-inch, pale blond Englishman can be spotted instantly in a crowd.

In just a handful of films, the 32-year-old actor has turned supporting parts into a distinctive body of work. There was his often-naked Chaucer in ``A Knight's Tale,'' Russell Crowe's imagined roommate in ``A Beautiful Mind,'' Crowe's cerebral seagoing buddy in ``Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World'' and, in the current release ``The Reckoning,'' a morally complex and compromised 14th-century priest.

And then there's that other standout performance of Bettany's: marrying Oscar-winning ``Mind'' beauty Jennifer Connelly.

Impressive as all of this has been, it almost feels like prologue to Bettany's latest screen effort in Lars von Trier's three-hour, experimental extravaganza, ``Dogville.'' The love-him-or-hate-him Danish director (``Dancer in the Dark,'' ``Breaking the Waves'') shot his parable of small-town small-mindedness on a single soundstage in Sweden. Except for some furniture and a few, two-dimensional facades, the buildings of the title Colorado hamlet were identified by chalk marks on the floor.

Bettany and an ensemble that includes Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall, Patricia Clarkson, Ben Gazzara and Chloe Sevigny play out a Depression-era passion play, in which Kidman's stranger-on-the-run, Grace, is first welcomed and sheltered by the village folk, then exploited by them in the most unconscionable ways.

Bettany is Tom Edison Jr., Dogville's self-appointed town ethicist and intellectual. It is he who speaks most fervently for Grace's cause, obviously falls in love with her and ultimately betrays her in a manner no less dreadful than his more overtly bestial neighbors.

``I think the character represents the part of Lars von Trier that Lars von Trier hates of himself,'' reckons Bettany, phoning from Toronto where his wife is shooting a horror movie and he's baby-sitting their 7-month-old son. ``He's a coward. He's this 20-year-old virgin who thinks of himself as a philosopher and a writer, and he's never actually written anything nor thought too deeply about anything. But if anybody's honest with themselves ... I mean, there's a bit of me in him, that kind of feeling so certain about things to the point of faith-shaking arrogance. He's a fool, a clown, really. But we're all hoping to be sort of more than we are.''

Bettany makes quite a bit of Tom. For all of its stylized artifice, ``Dogville'' rests on some of the most natural, subtlety-rich acting to hit the screen in ages, especially during Bettany and Kidman's closely framed dialogue exchanges. But the actor gives credit to his director for the results, not anything he thought up on his own.

Take five ... hundred

Operating a handheld, high-definition video camera, von Trier made the actors do the same scene over and over for the length of a day, without the usual breaks for lighting and setups. He later crafted their performances out of the resulting 10 to 12 hours' worth of takes in the editing room.

``By the end of the day, you've done a scene every way imaginable,'' Bettany explains. ``He's been going, 'Shout it! Shout it! Now do it quietly!' And that's what you do, all day long, so you don't give a performance. The consequence is, he's taken every take of people going, 'Hi, how are ya?' for an hour. But what's brilliant about it is that, when the real drama kicks off, you've invested so much time in just boring into infinitesimal details of these people's lives that it explodes with such ferocity.''

Bettany's refusal to take credit for his own talent is complemented by an ever-ready, self-mocking wit. That didn't prevent him from being terrified through most of the grueling production, though.

``It's all on you,'' he notes. ``You're like, 'Oh God, I've got to be really interesting now.' Behind us should be the Rocky Mountains, and that would be really beautiful to look at. But the Rocky Mountains aren't there. It's just my face; it's slightly stressful.''

Apparently, Bettany displays few signs of said stress.

``He is a funny, tall, geeky guy,'' says Paul McGuigan, who gave Bettany his first major film role as the frightening ``Gangster No. 1'' and also directed ``The Reckoning.''

``He's more like Chaucer than he is Gangster No. 1, that's for sure. If you look at his work, he's ranged from comedy to high drama and to very dark drama as well. Paul, like any good actor, is interested in other characters. And as a man, he's like that as well. He's interested in everybody and what they do, far more so than what he does. I can assure you that he does take his work quite seriously, but he's shy of the fact.''

Repeat co-star Russell Crowe, a man of strict judgments, echoes those sentiments.

``Working with Paul is very easy,'' Crowe comments. ``Paul has a long history of performing and we share some common ground, mainly in that we have both busked on the streets for a living at one point in our lives when we had no other way of making money. I think that if you ever really got down to those brass tacks, it's something that you do remember. And just who he is; he has an urbane and flowing wit, which makes him a wonderful companion.''

Yes, as a teenager, Bettany sang and played music on the streets and bridges of London. The son of a teacher-turned-actor, he eventually found his way into the city's prestigious Drama Centre school, and clocked a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

``Yeah, people often come out and pick up tramps,'' he says of his glamorous, singing-for-coins days. ``No, it wasn't a good way to meet girls. Being a movie star is much better than being poor.''

State of the nation

Disarming as he is, Bettany possesses his own strict judgments. Asked about the political implications of ``Dogville'' - Von Trier alternately confirms and denies that it's a specific critique of U.S. culture, and some critics have been outraged by its perceived anti-Americanism - the actor expressed strong opposition to the Iraq war.

``The whole way through making the movie, Lars would tell us it was set on the moon,'' Bettany says. ``I think it is about an isolated community. America was sort of born out of a sense of isolationism, which it needed to have in order to separate itself from Europe, and rightly so. But I think a sense of isolationism is quite a dangerous thing when you are then, years down the line, the most powerful nation in the world.''

Weighty ponderings, Bettany is relieved to note, have nothing to do with his next film, ``Wimbledon,'' a romantic comedy set in the professional tennis world and co-starring Kirsten Dunst. Weight-training, he says, precluded any possibility of that.

``I was going, 'Lovely, romantic comedy,' '' he initially thought. ``It'll be brilliant, I won't have to do the months of research that I usually do. And then six months of tennis training came into view. And going to the gym, which is something I'd never done and is, frankly, absurd. An edifying thought might come to you if you're doing something as simple as washing up. If you're lifting something heavy, nothing comes to your mind except, 'Let this be over, let this be over, let this be over.' ''

``Wimbledon'' was filmed last summer and opens in the fall. As for what's next, ``I don't know. I'm sitting back watching my toenails grow and playing with the baby, which is fabulous.''

Whatever the next one will be, don't expect to see Connelly in it.

``In Europe, Vincent Cassel can work with Monica Bellucci and nobody thinks about it,'' he observes regarding married couples acting on screen. ``But over here, people sort of go gunning for you if you're in a film together. I don't know where it comes from; I think people have the sort of attitude of, 'Oh God, don't rub your happiness in our faces.' I think the only way to do it is on the Burton-Taylor model, make a film where you just loathe each other like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' So if something like that came along, yeah.''

Joker. But one who knows he's incredibly lucky, so early in his career, to have made such a strong impression.

``I'm surprised that I'm allowed to do lots of different things, which has always been my desire,'' Bettany says. ``It's a very boring job if you just do the same thing all the time. Imagine how tedious it would be if you had to interview me endlessly.

``I feel really blessed.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

America through a foreign lens

Danish director Lars von Trier's ``Dogville'' has been slammed by some for its criticism of America - especially since von Trier has never set foot in this country.

The filmmaker usually counters that he knows more about U.S. culture through modern media than, say, the makers of ``Casablanca'' knew about Morocco. The point is well-taken, although the specific reference is poorly chosen. ``Casablanca'' was directed by a Hungarian, Michael Curtiz.

Curtiz also made ``Yankee Doodle Dandy.'' But he was a rare exception among foreign directors whose work reflected a keen interest in U.S. society; Curtiz was positive.

The tradition of viewing America as a land of violence, exploitation, racism, repression and worse goes back at least as far as Erich von Stroheim's 1925 ``Greed.'' It was expanded upon by other Austrian immigrants, many of them refugees from a rising Nazi Germany, such as film noir genius Fritz Lang (``Fury,'' ``You Only Live Once''), cynic extraordinaire Billy Wilder (``Double Indemnity,'' ``Sunset Boulevard,'' ``Ace in the Hole,'' ``The Apartment''), and self-important postwar culture critics Fred Zinneman (``The Men,'' ``High Noon,'' ``From Here to Eternity'') and Otto Preminger (``The Man With the Golden Arm,'' ``Advise and Consent,'' ``Hurry Sundown'').

Most of the great European auteurs of the 1950s, '60s and '70s avoided American subjects, and when the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni did take us on, their theoretical approaches usually ended up looking ludicrous. However, with the help of Jack Nicholson, Pole Roman Polanski and Czech Milos Forman filmed two of the smartest critiques ever made, ``Chinatown'' and ``One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.''

The British, understandably, have been among the most eager to examine America cinematically. And they have a marvelous record of getting it insightfully right (John Schlesinger's ``Midnight Cowboy,'' John Boorman's ``Deliverance'') and spectacularly wrong (Tony Richardson's ``The Border'').

Oddly enough, visuals-obsessed Brit Ridley Scott has clocked a high percentage of interesting takes on American subjects in movies as diverse as ``Blade Runner,'' ``Thelma & Louise'' and ``Black Hawk Down.'' Scott's contemporary, Alan Parker, has done just the opposite; whenever he's tried to dissect one injustice or another - Japanese-American internment in ``Come See the Paradise,'' the civil rights movement in ``Mississippi Burning,'' the death penalty in ``The Life of David Gale'' - he's made an abject fool of himself. Current Britfant terrible Sam Mendes (``American Beauty,'' ``Road to Perdition'') seems trapped somewhere between cartoonish notions of the country and moving perceptions of its soul.

We'd be negligent not to end with von Trier's fellow Dane, Douglas Sirk, whose 1950s soap operas such as ``All That Heaven Allows'' and ``Written on the Wind'' dug deep into the emotional and psychosexual prices paid for the era's prosperous dream.

- B.S.

CAPTION(S):

3 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Standing out

Lanky Paul Bettany emerging as a star

(2) no caption (Paul Bettany)

Theo Wargo/WireImage.com

(3) Bettany plays a self-appointed philosopher who takes an interest in Nicole Kidman in ``Dogville.''

Box:

America through a foreign lens (see text)