Todd Solondz (2016)
Wiener-Dog is a portmanteau film, its episodes linked by a dachshund bitch and by themes of futility and mortality. The movie starts with the title character being deposited at a dogs’ home. From there, she begins her odyssey through a series of four, increasingly old owners – a child, a thirty-something, an elderly man, an octogenarian woman. The first owner – a nine-year-old boy called Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke) – is recovering from cancer. The last owner (Ellen Burstyn) calls the dog Cancer; when her puzzled granddaughter Zoe (Zosia Mamet) asks why, Nana replies, ‘It seemed right’. Visiting her grandmother for the first time in a long time, Zoe also questions Nana spending her twilight years in a house set at the side of a noisy major road. The dog’s life ends there, when she wanders out into the road and gets run over by a truck. Zoe’s rare visit to Nana is prompted by a need for funds – for herself and for her artist boyfriend Fantasy (Michael Shaw). Three months later, a stuffed animatronic dachshund is a main exhibit at Fantasy’s latest show.
There are funny lines, comic-sketch pleasures and arresting images in Wiener-Dog but Todd Solondz’s pessimism feels automatic and the story’s construction is negligent. It’s messy that Solondz explains how the first change of ownership happens but not the subsequent ones. When Remi’s bullying, bullhorn-voiced father Danny (a one-note Tracy Letts) has had enough of the dog throwing up and crapping, he takes her to the vet to be euthanised. The vet’s assistant Dawn (Greta Gerwig, who’s affecting as usual) smuggles the animal out and takes possession of her. It’s right enough that the dog’s reprieve is described; the rationale for not explaining her later transfers may be that the animal’s life is meant to be a proxy for haplessly fortuitous human existence. But the dachshund’s cheerful inscrutability makes her too different from Todd Solondz people to function as an illustration of the human condition – and the writer-director’s approach comes across as more generally casual.
The film’s third episode climaxes with her depressed owner strapping explosives to the dog. Although he shows a sinister bomb disposal man inching towards the (unperturbed) animal, Solondz is otherwise indifferent to this cliffhanger. It would make sense for the dachshund’s name to change each time her ownership changed – and there’s no doubt that Solondz attaches importance to names. While she’s Remi’s pet, wiener dog is called Wiener Dog. Dawn renames her Doody, which nicely combines her new owner’s sweet sentimentality and the excretory problems that, in effect, brought the dachshund into Dawn’s life. Dawn’s own surname is Wiener: this young woman is the adolescent protagonist of Welcome to the Dollhouse, Solondz’s first success, twenty years on. The sad, superannuated film studies professor who turns the animal into an explosive device has the fine name of Dave Schmerz (and Danny DeVito is impressively unhappy in the role) but Solondz doesn’t bother to rename the dog during her time with Schmerz. He then does so very emphatically when she moves to the moribund Nana.
The death theme in Wiener-Dog would have more bite if there were more people in the world of Todd Solondz who deserved better. These are in short supply since he’s deeply pessimistic partly because he’s strongly misanthropic. The relatively likeable human beings – Remi, Dawn, Zoe – tend to be appealing in a similar register – they’re wan yet emotionally knotted up. Solondz gives Dawn – perhaps for old times’ sake – a low-key happy ending. Buying dog food for Doody, she bumps into Brandon (Kieran Culkin), whom Dawn knew at school, and agrees to go with him to Ohio. When she asks him what’s in Ohio, he replies ‘crystal meth’; in fact, his younger brother Tommy (Connor Long) and Tommy’s wife April (Bridget Brown) are there too. They adore Doody and Dawn leaves her with them. (There’s no further narrative involving Tommy and Dawn – they don’t really count among the dog’s owners in the main scheme of the movie.) As they drive away, Dawn and Brandon tentatively touch each other’s hand. In contrast, Solondz makes things as miserable as possible for Remi. After Danny has taken Wiener Dog to the vet, Remi’s mother Dina (Julie Delpy) doesn’t euphemise the dog’s disappearance by telling her son that she’s gone to a better place. Returning her to the dogs’ home, with good new owners as a possibility, seems a more likely scenario then asking a vet to euthanise a basically healthy dog but Solondz ignores this. In spite of the fact that Remi has already survived serious illness, Solondz prefers to show the child, through the loss of Wiener Dog, being confronted with mortality.
Nana’s apprehension of death, at close quarters, feels less predetermined. At first, her cynical, foul-mouthed wisecracking suggests a geriatric movie type. Once she removes the dark glasses she wears indoors, however, Ellen Burstyn achieves shades of a different kind – her face starts to achieve a real weight of fear and regret. Sitting in her garden after Zoe and Fantasy have taken their leave, Nana has a dream in which she’s visited by a succession of identical young girls (incarnated by Melo Ludwig), each of whom represents what Nana might have been. This sequence – as well as being visually striking – is funny in things like the anti-climax of the selection of if-onlys incanted by the clone girls (‘if only you’d liked other people more, if only you’d liked yourself more, if only you’d left bigger tips …’) The most simply enjoyable comedy comes in the Dave Schmerz episode, when he sits on a panel interviewing a prospective student for admission to film school. This young man (excellent Charlie Tahan) is full of enthusiasm but bereft of cinema knowledge to such an extent that the panel ends up imploring him just to ‘name a movie you’ve seen – any movie’. Funny as the scene is, it’s pretty obvious – and that goes for most of Solondz’s satire of the pretensions and frustrations of those who want to make it creatively: Dave Schmerz’s doomed attempts, via one emptily encouraging agent after another, to sell a screenplay; aspiring actress Zoe’s desperate insistence to Nana that the bit part she’s landed is a big deal; the uncompromising, temperamental artist Fantasy (‘which is, actually, his real name’).
Todd Solondz is working in this film for the second time with Edward Lachman (he also shot Life During Wartime). Lachman’s cinematography adds lustrous substance to proceedings, whether or not the object of attention is conventionally beautiful. The most remarkable example of this occurs when Remi’s parents go out, leaving him and Wiener Dog alone in the house together. Solondz shows boy and dog rolling, in blissful slow motion, in a snowstorm of feathers produced from the insides of a pillow. This is followed, after Remi has disastrously decided to feed Wiener Dog granola bars (‘I thought they were healthy’), by the camera moving, with fascinated languor, along the products of canine insides: a seemingly unending stream of diarrhoea. These juxtaposed sequences are both scored to Debussy’s ‘Clair de lune’. Solondz’s rapt attention to the physically extraordinary is more discomfiting when he’s looking at people. It’s discomfiting for this viewer because it makes me worry I have issues with these people’s appearance – until I realise that Solondz is deliberately encouraging this reaction, that it’s he who’s decided that Tommy and April should be a Down’s syndrome couple and to emphasise the extremely slow-moving bulk of Yvette (Marcella Lowery), Nana’s African-American carer.
Halfway through, Solondz inserts a faux intermission, which introduces a song written for the film by Marc Shaiman. The dachshund travels a good deal in the course of the movie – Ohio, New York (for the Dave Schmerz part) and so on – and the intermission shows the dog superimposed on various American landscapes. The shots are accompanied by Shaiman’s gutsy folk ballad (‘Wiener dog, wiener dog/Just looking for some shelter and a place to rest her head’). This serves as a taster for the full song, which is played over the closing credits. Its comic vibrancy sends you out of the theatre on a high – which is amazing, all things considered. It will prove there’s no justice in the world – not that Todd Solondz needs proof – if ‘The Ballad of Wiener Dog’ isn’t nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song.
16 August 2016
