Year of the Dog

"Year of the Dog" is by no means a Hollywood movie. No "perfect" characters here. No "perfect" story. Don't get me wrong, I love a good Hollywood movie. By all means, bring on the popcorn! We do, indeed, need that sort of entertainment in this day and age. I truly love it!

I'm just saying that this film is another breed altogether. "Year of the Dog" deals with situations, realities, and characters one might actually encounter in real life.

This film is brilliant in that it doesn't take sides. An animal lover (like myself) can watch it, and feel fulfilled and amused. A non-animal-lover (unlike myself) can likewise watch it, and feel fulfilled and amused.

Quite a tightrope writer/director Mr. White has created for himself. . .and completely succeeded at traversing. Bravo sir!

It's ultimately a story about how different sorts of people find a way of dealing with the painful events in their lives.

The actors are all on top form (particularly Regina King, Molly Shannon, Laura Dern, Josh Pais, and Peter Saarsgard--not to mention all the beautiful animals).

One could view this story as an exploration of "Dysfunction in modern America". Or, one could view this story as an exploration of "How to deal with dysfunction in modern America".

Take your pick...

It's a woefully uneven film that seems longer than its 97 minutes, yet Molly Shannon brings her particularly individualistic appeal to the role of Peggy, a diffident, socially awkward secretary whose most meaningful relationship is with her beagle Pencil. The attraction is understandable as the dog is adorable and attentive, whereas the people in Peggy's life are too self-absorbed to get past judgment of her solitary existence. As he showed with his script for 2002's The Good Girl, screenwriter and first-time director Mike White has a unique way of presenting characters' idiosyncrasies on screen that seems both bemused and generous. He brings Peggy's quiet desperation and passive acceptance to life with extended shots that seem almost taken from still-life photos. The inevitable occurs, and Peggy's feeling of culpability spirals her into despair groping for what she should do next.

Most of the 2007 film deals with her tentative journey, and while much of the film is driven by character-driven laughs, there is a deepening sense of melancholy with every episode. Toward the final stretch, White unfortunately carries things too far and has Peggy go into extremities before finding her destiny, and her behavior at this point threatens to upend the goodwill generated by what happened before. Regardless, he has assembled quite an impressive cast to inhabit his somewhat askew characters starting with Shannon who manages to convey Peggy's loneliness with surprising subtlety. Consider that this otherwise slapstick comic actress has made her reputation on slapstick, spastic characters like Mary Katherine in Superstar or Val, the obsessive, kleptomaniac neighbor in several episodes of Will & Grace. Instead, her low-key portrayal comes close to Jennifer Aniston's exemplary work in The Good Girl.

Returning from that movie in typical hangdog fashion, John C. Reilly plays Peggy's lunk-headed neighbor who admits to killing his own dog in a hunting accident, a revelation that exposes his fascination with guns and dead animal heads. Regina King is her sassy self though oddly encouraged to play over-the-top as Peggy's sassy office co-worker Layla, whose own relationship with a philanderer unmasks as much desperation as Peggy's situation. Laura Dern is flat-out hilarious as Peggy's sister-in-law Bret, a well-meaning control freak married to overly cautious Pier played by Thomas McCarthy. There's also a funny turn by Josh Pais as Peggy's Dilbert-inspired boss, and Peter Sarsgaard takes a lighter but still bizarre turn than usual as Newt, the passively manipulative, sexually confused dog trainer who really sets off Peggy's darker side.

The 2007 DVD comes with quite a few extras starting with the amusing, off-kilter commentary by White and Shannon. Their chemistry continues in a seven-minute "Moviefone Unscripted with Molly Shannon and Mike White", where the two ask each other questions from Moviefone users. There is the obligatory making-of featurette, the sixteen-minute "A Special Breed of Comedy: The Making of Year of the Dog". Those were satisfying enough, but there are also three additional shorts of only marginal interest - one focusing on the training of the dogs used in the film and the other two brief, four-minute profiles of Shannon and White. One extended and seven deleted scenes are included as well as a three-minute gag reel and a quick photo album of unique images presented as an insert reel.

"Year of the Dog" is by no means a Hollywood movie. No "perfect" characters here. No "perfect" story. Don't get me wrong, I love a good Hollywood movie. By all means, bring on the popcorn! We do, indeed, need that sort of entertainment in this day and age. I truly love it!

I'm just saying that this film is another breed altogether. "Year of the Dog" deals with situations, realities, and characters one might actually encounter in real life.

This film is brilliant in that it doesn't take sides. An animal lover (like myself) can watch it, and feel fulfilled and amused. A non-animal-lover (unlike myself) can likewise watch it, and feel fulfilled and amused.

Quite a tightrope writer/director Mr. White has created for himself. . .and completely succeeded at traversing. Bravo sir!

It's ultimately a story about how different sorts of people find a way of dealing with the painful events in their lives.

The actors are all on top form (particularly Regina King, Molly Shannon, Laura Dern, Josh Pais, and Peter Saarsgard--not to mention all the beautiful animals).

One could view this story as an exploration of "Dysfunction in modern America". Or, one could view this story as an exploration of "How to deal with dysfunction in modern America".

Take your pick...

It is surprising to realize that Mike White has not directed a film till now, because he's such a distinct film presence, but it's also disappointing that 'Year of the Dog' is such a distasteful and ultimately tedious effort, perhaps too much of a good thing. But 'Chuck and Buck' was also maddeningly irritating. In that, which White wrote, White himself played an extremely annoying, clueless gay man (which one would have thought was a rare commodity) who played around with another guy as a boy and then expects the man, who's grown up and straight, to be interested in his advances as an adult. The Good Girl was funnier. It depicted not just a single idea but more of a social world, and its Middle America dimwits were not handled too condescendingly; White's writing struck a balance, and Jake Gyllenhaal's character had some hilarious lines.

Mike White has done television, and wrote the very funny 'School of Rock' and the pretty funny 'Orange County.' He almost seems a formula writer (a successful one, in his TV writing and Orange County), except that his taste for the embarrassing and odd is recurrent and obvious. Chuck and Buck, which somehow seems White's signature effort, was one embarrassing scene after another. The question with 'The Good Girl' is, Are these people being made mean fun of, or are they being viewed sympathetically though they're a bit dumb? White has acted films he wrote and others, including the embarrassing, tasteless and borderline awful 'Star Maps,' directed by Miguel Arteta -- which at least led to a fruitful collaboration since Arteta directed White's Chuck and Buck and 'The Good Girl.'

People seemed to love 'Chuck and Buck.' They thought it was witty and edgy. I thought it was just embarrassing and borderline homophobic. No, make that out and out homophobic. White is involved in movies of the kind I like to call "Todd Solondz lite." In them strange people get involved in situations that are uncomfortable to watch, but it's never made clear what we're supposed to think; the filmmakers themselves don't seem to be able to make up their minds. White is just being a little different, avoiding either being earnest or being witty. The titillation people get out of his work is that they laugh, and then wonder if they're supposed to, and they find that interesting.

Year of the Dog is not earnest and it's not witty. It doesn't know what it wants to be or what its main character is meant to be. Can she be both ridiculous and pathetic? Can we laugh at her and still sympathize with her? Why would we want to sympathize? These are typical "Solondz lite" questions. Peggy (comedy actress Molly Shannon, and not a very interesting actress or someone you want to look at through a whole movie) is an office worker who has no life. She is forty-something but has never dated, and her emotional world begins and ends with her pet dog, Pencil. Pencil eats something he shouldn't and dies and Peggy is devastated. She begins behaving strangely, overacting her dog love. She starts helping out with people who get people to adopt dogs. She adopts a vicious German shepherd and gets a guy named Newt (Peter Sarsgaard) from the vet's to train him. When that leads to disaster on the canine and human fronts she becomes wackier. She steals funds from the office to donate to animal rights organizations and winds up adopting fifteen dogs from the pound. Along the way she has dated her neighbor, Al (John C. Reilly), who is contrasted with Newt. Newt is a sensitive soul who's also dysfunctional, "celibate," but unable to have a relationship "with a woman, or with a man." He's a vegan and Peggy becomes one, at that time imagining that she and Newt may become a couple. Al loves hunting and meat. Peggy gets into serious trouble, including a hostile situation with Newt, but then is forgiven and gets her job back despite embezzling company funds. If the story was turning dark at some points, it goes all mushy at the end. That is a routine "Solodnz lite" ending; but while such movies have at times been surprising and thought-provoking, this one is simply odd and irritating and hard to sit through.

There are excruciating things in 'Year of the Dog' but also implausible ones. It seems unlikely that Peggy's sister-in-law Bret (Laura Dern), who seems to represent the overprotective mother (and little else), should have a whole rack of fur coats, just to annoy Peggy. White is pushing around advocacies and dysfunctionalities randomly rather than representing reality or telling a story. One increasingly has the feeling of being inside a hermetic bubble containing White's preoccupations and observations that's completely artificial and not very interesting, just uncomfortable. This seems a hell of a way to make a movie, but people laugh at it, because they don't know what else to do, and the fact that they don't know why they're laughing makes them think this is an original kind of humor.

I'm a sucker for movies about people and their pets. This film stars former SNL player Molly Shannon as a secretary whose personal life revolves around her beagle, Pencil. When he passes away unexpectedly, she has to find another reason to go on. The film first hints that she'll discover the world of humans around her, particularly men, as two new ones (John C. Reilly & Peter Saarsgard) enter her life. But it smartly steers away from the obvious and veers into a more original voyage of self-discovery. My only real problem with the film is that a lot of the supporting characters are a little too caricature-esquire (notably Shannon's boss, played by Josh Pais), but writer/director White does a good job of redeeming them for the most part. A very touching, gentle film that's well worth your time.