THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF DOG
Stark but meaningful Wiener-Dog urges us to try a little tenderness
“A big, fat elephant drowning in a sea of despair” is how a Mariachi musician in Todd Solondz’s new film describes America.
Wiener-Dog is about that elephant, and also about a dachshund who, like the musician, is itinerant, passed on from owner to owner.
Solondz is a caustic satirist who has already excoriated his country through the depiction of taboos (from rape to pedophilia, in iconic indie films such as Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness), but in this case, the dog may have softened him up — well, just a little bit.
His latest is a four-part anthology film stitched together by the titular canine; a self-consciously cheesy intermission shows her wandering across America from deserts to forests, from a strip club to a crime scene. She’s a mythical every-dog whose quiet, dignified cuteness relieves the human absurdity around her.
In each part, the dog is owned by successively older, more cynical people, for whom she provides a bulwark against loneliness. Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke) is an earnest boy in remission from cancer, whose impatient parents (Julie Delpy and Tracy Letts) try to “break” the dog (“It’s a kind of civilizing, so they act like humans”). Dawn (Greta Gerwig) is a sullen veterinarian’s assistant who was once an endlessly picked-on junior high school student — nicknamed “Wiener Dog” — in Welcome to the Dollhouse.
Danny DeVito plays a film school professor whose students have nothing but disdain for him, and Ellen Burstyn is a misanthropic elderly woman who wears oversized shades as if trying unsuccessfully to block the outside world.
Wiener-Dog’s feel is stark, but every scene is subtly packed with meaning.
An overhead shot of DeVito, as Dave Schmerz, looking balefully up to a rack of rotating convenience store hotdogs is at once a visual pun, a comment on the screenwriter’s dangerous attraction to mass-produced “shtick” (“There but for the grace of dog,” Solondz seems to be saying), and a foreshadowing of a cruelly funny scene to come.
It’s all punctuated by uncomfortable, sometimes outrageous, comedy. Wiener-Dog often evokes multiple emotions: One tracking shot of a trail of dog diarrhea, lovingly filmed by Edward Lachman (Carol) and accompanied by Debussy’s Clair de Lune, is disgustingly poetic.
And even when Solondz moves in for what seems to be a cheap shot, he zooms out to show a more complicated picture. The seemingly odious characters have redeeming qualities, etched out by nuanced acting.
Delpy, playing Remi’s mother, is both bigoted and maternally caring. And even Dawn’s love interest, the bad-news Brandon (Kieran Culkin) returns from Welcome to the Dollhouse a little wiser, with a smidgen of empathy. It’s one thing to chuckle at easy targets, another to recognize in them something of oneself.
As Donald Trump — scourge of Mariachi musicians, and many more besides — rides that Republican elephant down the campaign trail, nastiness has become mainstream. To be properly transgressive, Solondz seems to say, “Try a little tenderness.”