The key moment of Lars von Trier’s “Manderlay” comes after the narrative is finished and we hear David Bowie’s “Young Americans” over the closing credits, accompanied by a montage of scenes from America’s turbulent racial history. You can guess what kinds of things: Klan meetings, lynchings, Martin Luther King in his coffin, poor people looking miserable amidst indescribable squalor.

Compared with the dull but seriously heavy thinking that has gone before, this awkward leap into standard leftist and anti-American agitprop suggests a certain uneasiness on Mr. Von Trier’s part – as if he were afraid people wouldn’t “get” the deliberately non-visual and literary technique he uses in the rest of the film. To me, the ending looks like the author’s blowing a postmodern raspberry in his own face.

A sort of sequel to the author’s Dogville but with Bryce Dallas Howard succeeding Nicole Kidman in the role of Grace, it is made in a similar style.

Divided into “chapters,” the basic story is written in the now artificial language of a 19th-century novel, and is read in a voice-over, third person narration by John Hurt at his syrupiest. The actors perform, often in mime, on a bare soundstage with a minimum of props. Buildings and other features of the landscape are outlined in chalk on the floor but otherwise absent.

The film’s refusal to distract with cinematic thrills seems an attempt to accentuate the thoughtfulness of the philosophical meditation on power and oppression that is the film’s real – or at least its earlier – point.

Not that the heavy thinking was all that interesting to begin with. But, unlike the rah-rah lefty, down-with-racist-America conclusion, at least it deserved to be taken seriously.

The basic idea of the film is that Grace, the sheltered daughter of a gangster (William Dafoe) comes upon a community somewhere in the Deep South in the 1930s where slavery never ended.The slaves, led by the immensely dignified house servant, Wilhelm (Danny Glover), continue to plant and pick the cotton for aged matriarch Ma’am (Lauren Bacall) just as if they had never heard of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Innocent young Grace naturally assumes that all she has to do is tell them they are free and they will leave the plantation and put in their claims for the 40 acres and mule to which they are supposedly entitled by law.

Gangster Daddy is skeptical, however. He reminds her of the time when she opened the door of her little canary’s cage and later found the creature frozen to death outside her window.

The canary’s name was Tweety. The slaves on Ma’am’s plantation seem similarly unprepared for freedom. But Grace insists, “It’s our abuse has made them what they are.” Once Ma’am has died, Grace determines in defiance of her father’s warnings to play the benevolent white liberal and teach the poor black folks how to be free.

Of course, each liberal thought and sentiment is rigorously examined for any trace of patronizing superiority, but the situation is rife with it, however good Grace’s intentions. In the end the slaves vote – as she has taught them to do – but they vote unanimously for her to become the new Ma’am.

This is a bare outline of the narrative arc, filled out by Mr. Hurt’s exaggeratedly plummy narration. There are only a couple of genuinely dramatic moments that rise above the schematic presentation of the rest.

One is when an old woman, Wilma (Mona Hammond), is convicted of stealing food from a sick child in a time of hardship,so causing her death.Grace pleads for Wilma’s life, but the slaves demand that she be executed for killing the child. Are they free to decide these things for themselves, as Grace has told them they are, or is liberal clemency to be imposed on their wishes from above?

The other is when Grace falls for Timothy (Isaach De Bankole), the glamorous young rebel among the slaves, at least as she sees him. At first she represses her own desires, but at a crucial moment she succumbs to some forceful (and explicitly recorded) moments of sexual domination.

This amounts to an allusion to the feminist account of male power and oppression we expect to cut across the racial narrative, but it is not followed up. Instead, the point seems to be that Grace, in spite of her liberal good intentions, will naturally fall into the role of Ma’am.

Within the terms of Mr. von Trier’s political treatise, this sort of makes sense, though its remoteness from the real world – underscored by the author himself with his bare and schematic sets and the stilted language of his voice-over storytelling – makes it necessary for the viewer to have an already well-developed ideological consciousness in order to swallow it.

The reader will not be surprised to learn that I have not such a consciousness and did not swallow it.The interesting thing is that the weird and strident ending suggests that, at some level, Mr. von Trier is finding it a little difficult to swallow as well.

***

Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know but that Justin Lin’s “Annapolis” will tell you. The point of attending the United States Military Academy, at least if you are a blue collar kid from the wrong side of the river, is to find yourself a pretty midshipwoman, get her to teach you all she knows about boxing, and then climb into the ring with the Academy’s heavyweight champ.

Oh, and by the way, there’s some sort of educational activity going on in the intervals between boxing matches.

Welcome, once again, to Hollywood bizarro world. Just think of all it has taught us that we wouldn’t otherwise know – for example, that the Vietnam War made the impact that it did on American POWs because they were forced to play Russian roulette with their captors, or that Pearl Harbor, nasty as it was for the American armed forces, at least had the virtue of sparing Kate Beckinsale the embarrassment of having two boyfriends at once.

More recently, we have learned from the movies that the English settlement of North America was chiefly notable because it coincided with Captain John Smith’s midlife crisis and that the man charged with avenging the terrorist atrocity at Munich in 1972 retired from the Israeli secret service to take up moralizing.

“Annapolis” assumes the Navy has taken literally the Army’s silly promise to its recruits that they will be “An Army of One.”

In theory, former shipbuilder and amateur boxer Jake Huard (James Franco) is there to serve his country, but as that ambition appears to have zero cinematical interest, Mr. Lin and his screenwriter, David Collard, don’t bother to show him serving his country – only boxing.

Perhaps because most of us have seen a boxing movie before – and because there is a certain sameness to boxing movies – the usual formula is varied here by replacing the crusty old trainer with the pretty and shyly devoted girlfriend (Jordana Brewster). After all, Annapolis and the Navy itself have already been co-ed for a generation.

Anyway, Mr. Franco is just as pretty. Fresh from his soulful Tristan, he is here a soulful Jake who tells us he has been told all his life that he’s not good enough. Piffle! Does Hollywood think we can’t recognize a golden boy when we see one? Here’s a guy who has obviously been told all his life just the opposite.

But remember, it’s Hollywood bizarro world, where Naval Academy plebes say things like: “I know we’re four guys in a shower, but can we keep the testosterone to a minimum?”

It should be obvious by now that any stray resemblance to an actual institution in Maryland is purely coincidental.