gun in the coven

thomas vinterberg's dear wendy is a total waste; you spend half the film wondering if the premise—five pacifists in a middle-america mining town who start up a "social experiment" gun club called "the dandies"—will ever amount to something that resembles, allegorically or otherwise, modern america.
the film begins with dickie (jamie bell, chumscrubber, billy elliott) writing a letter, "dear wendy ...," which we learn later is a letter to his beloved hand revolver (not, in fact, a girl). lars von trier, who wrote the script for vinterberg, has framed the bare-bones narrative in a similar brechtian fashion as he latest features dogville and manderlay. dickie, a social outcast, comes across an old gun, falls "in love" with it and starts a sort of anti-nra gun club with a crew of fellow motley outcasts.
the club hangs out, dresses up in victorian garb, spouts rhetoric and shoots guns in an abandoned mine on the outskirts of town. bit by bit, each dandy becomes more and more enamored with their respective weapon; no doubt, this is intended to be an allegory for "america's obsession with guns, violence, you-fill-in-the-blank." of course, by the end of the film, dickie's experiment goes awry (of course) and the narrative arc reveals that pacifism exists outside of the pragmatic.
vinterberg is not on the same page as von trier. while the narrative begins with snarky third-person voice-over and progressively evolves into a first-person story, the director is not sensitive to the formalist, stripped-down quasi-fairy-tale approach by writer von trier. as a result, vinterberg's style is uneven: one minute he's telling a story with static, john-ford like takes; next minute he's using jump cuts and david-fincher like inserts (characters are shot, and then vinterberg shows charts of bullet entry points and details of how each wound affects the inflicted).
bill pullman plays the town sheriff, a naive straight-shooter who, in all likelihood, probably embodys the the filmmakers more than any other character in the film (this is not a good thing). both von trier and vinterberg have an almost puerile outlook toward gun violence and authority; this doesn't bode well when the dandies stop shooting at targets and start gunning for the flesh. the film ends in tragedy, but, really, how could such a one-trick pony end up any other way—when in doubt, take 'em out!