+1
Just saw this last night. I agree with Swedish: I'm not sure how someone can play down the anti-Americanism. It's not just the choice of music and the images over the credits, but von Trier has called this the first film in his "USA - Land of Opportunities" trilogy. It's really blatant, and I think it's disingenuous to say it's really about humanity as a whole.
As a film I guess it's fairly impressive. I like the soundstage conceit plenty (though wish it had been utilized a bit more creatively; I expected a lot more clever irony based around it than there ended up being) and it's well-acted, and as Holden says the dialogue with Caan at the end is quite good (partially because it doesn't sound like movie dialogue much). But the anti-Americanism is incredibly clumsy. It's not a matter of it being extreme or a caricature--I've come to expect that from supposed skewerings of my country by self-important filmmakers--it's that it's just downright confused, at least insofar as it's supposed to be about America at all.
Even taken purely as a statement about the evils humanity is capable of, I don't find it terribly convincing. Grace doesn't plead her case and while some of the evils that befall her feel plausible and natural, some just feel completely out of left field. The whole idea of making a statement about what ordinary people are capable of is to make us believe it, to show it happening gradually before our very eyes, but there are too many "jumps" in the characters' moral degradation here.