Filmmaker Todd Solondz has a low opinion of humankind. It was there in his first successful film, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and scorn for people has been key to his work ever since. His characters are grim-faced, sometimes nasty, usually depressed, exploitive, exploited, stupid, self-indulgent and dishonest. With a few exceptions, Solondz’ latest work, Wiener-Dog, follows the others, and in fact, he continues a story of Dawn Wiener, the lead character of Welcome to the Dollhouse.
It’s a film in two parts. The first starts with a man in semi-rural northern New Jersey buying a dachshund for his son, who calls the pet Wiener-Dog. The mother disapproves; the man says it will be good for the boy, and proceeds to mistreat both dog and kid. He describes housebreaking a dog as bending it to your will. It’s like people becoming civilized, he says, drawing a dismal parallel between dog life and human life. As you might imagine, things do not go well between the dog, the dog-faced little boy and the rest of the family.
The second part of the film again features the dog, who somehow survives part one when she’s snatched from near-death by veterinary assistant Dawn Wiener (Greta Gerwig). Kids used to call her Wiener-Dog, so she renames this dog Doody – and brings Doody into misadventures that ultimately involve Danny DeVito as a teacher of screenwriting, along with a mariachi band hitch-hiking around Ohio. The similarity between Wiener-Dog and Dawn Wiener is clear throughout the picture.
Depending on how you look at it, Wiener-Dog is a jumble of elements that range between misanthropic and self-serving. The tangent about screen writing winds around and around, without ever resolving itself. The events of part one leave little stain to inform the second half of the film, and it is a question of stain.
But Wiener-Dog has some exquisite moments that bind you to the film, and keep you watching when you otherwise wonder why you bother. The film is shot by the fine cinematographer Ed Lachman – he filmed Todd Haynes’s movie Carol last year. The first images of the dog in a green cage in a green room glow and shimmer with a magnificently uncomfortable mix of elegance and horror. The color overwhelms and it’s repeated throughout the film so that you can’t escape the feeling of the imprisonment of the dog’s first cage. Color overall is never incidental – never just the color of the objects on screen. Lachman’s colors demand that you notice them and feel their power.
Todd Solondz is no comedian, but once in a while his dark comedy spills out in a shot or a sequence. The intermission imagery between the two parts of the film is funny and lovely, and pictures the dog as something of a movie hero, walking grandly through Monument Valley, location of most of John Ford’s greatest films, and eventually past the White House. And in the movie’s one genuinely touching moment, two children with Down syndrome play together. Solondz has genuine care for people most afflicted, and he presents these two characters with no hint of his typical contempt.
The rest of us are fair game. The movie despises the uniformity of suburbs, the way people talk to each other, junk food, lying parents. The film can be like Diane Arbus photos, but with less concern for the subjects because Solondz seems to see most human failings as matters of choice. He’s not interested in how or why people live as they do, just that we’re despicable. There’s no excuse for the father in part one or for the screenwriter’s fatuous agent in part two. What Solondz does see in Wiener-Dog though is what ill-treatment does to the sad-sack son and to the listless Dawn.
But just when you might feel something for Wiener-Dog and its maker, the film ends with an ironic scene that simply rubs it all in. The irony isn’t revealing; it’s just cruel.
