‘Wrong’ a shaggy dog of a movie
Answering the question “what’s weirder than a movie about a sentient car tire on a killing spree?,” director Quentin Dupieux gives us “Wrong,” a literal and figurative shaggy-dog story that takes its surreal kinks in stride.
Jack Plotnick plays Dolph, a mild, inquisitive man who has lost his dog. Setting out to find it one morning, he slowly learns of a bizarre conspiracy gone wrong, leaving him the victim of a plan that mysterious forces set in motion, ostensibly for his benefit. (Viewers will have no trouble seeing allegory in the plot, though direct this-equals-that readings seem to underestimate the weirdness of Dupieux’s sensibility.)
Even before he learns of this plan, though, Dolph’s quest has deeply strange overtones. If the look on his face is more suggestive of subconscious existential puzzlement than a pet owner’s anxiety, there’s good reason: Things are more than a little off in Dolph’s pale-colored world, from the alarm clock that wakes him at 7:60 a.m. to the palm tree in his front yard that turns into a pine overnight. Reality in “Wrong” is one in which the things we take for granted — a rabbit in a pizza joint’s logo, say — are discussed at length. Meanwhile, more puzzling matters — an office in which fire sprinklers run all day — are taken in stride.
If that workplace where it’s always raining has something of a Charlie Kaufman vibe, and a later scene involving backward motion and sudden violence recalls David Lynch, Dupieux makes it all his own in context. Every now and then he goes one “wrong” too far, as with the goofy, amorphously Asian accent affected by William Fichtner as “Master Chang” (Fich- tner’s mystery-man performance holds together, despite the weird vocal gimmick). But even the little missteps tend to be funny, and therefore forgivable.
The presence of a comprehensible (if skeletal) plot beneath it all should help, allowing arthouse patrons to feel they “got it” even if they weren’t on board for every quirk. Plotnick’s unkempt persistence and a wry score by Tahiti Boy and Mr. Oizo (Oizo being the nom de musique of Dupieux himself) give the film just enough narrative momentum to carry it through short stretches in which cryptic plotlessness threatens to sink it. If the premise isn’t as attention-grabbing as it was in “Rubber,” Dupieux’s breakthrough movie, the execution should help build the filmmaker’s following.