Year of the Dog

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.

Year of the Dog is another one of those films attempting to get under the skin of the notion that comedy and one's potential to fall into madness, at least cinematically, are closer than you initially think. As a matter of opinion, comedy and madness, or the idea that a character can loose control of their surroundings after having existed within the realms they occupied for so long, can indeed go hand in hand; they can play out in a balanced fashion, particularly when there's something especially biting or satirical about it, resulting in pieces from recent years along the lines of Verbinski's The Weather Man or Harron's American Psycho. Take this, and sprinkle in a little bit of sub-text to do with contemporary suburban America and the oddballs one would seemingly encounter within such an environment, and you have what people like to describe as an "off beat" film trying to cover some serious ground, albeit getting tangled up somewhat in the process.

Year of the Dog's lead is Molly Shannon's Peggy, a middle aged American woman living alone in a nice American neighbourhood, on a nice estate, in a decent house and with her pride and joy in the form of her pet dog she names Pencil. To say she loves Pencil understates things somewhat; she all of adorns him, lavishing attention on the thing no end – even allowing it to sleep with her on her bed come the nighttime which, to some, would be the beginnings of madness before all the strife has really begun. The pair of them are so attuned to one another, and she to the species in general, that during walks in the park, Peggy cannot help but stare lovingly at all the other pooches owned by all the other people doing as she does now, while Pencil is even granted some brief screen time of his own when he agonisingly watches her back out of the driveway to get to work thus, he is tragically left all be himself. Peggy's life is what it is: single, but more than happy with her pet. Where her boss has his work and Peggy's brother Pier (McCarthy), plus his wife Bret (Dern), have their very young children, Peggy has her dog.

Her boss is Robin (Pais), a largely inanimate gentleman with a reservedly cold tone. He outlines certain harsh realities in his office that morning at work, the background of his composition busy with a motorway in the distance plus traffic charging in either direction; hers, in comparison, is the rest of the office: a stilted and quieter set of items on show highlighting respective positions in life as specific facts broadly linked to ability and qualifications are mercilessly outlined. Her work colleague is the busier Layla (King), an African-American woman with a penchant for films; a cheating partner and some pretty lousy advice for our heroine when things get tougher later on. Those things arrive when poor Pencil dies, a mysterious death at a relatively young age when he is heard yelping and yapping one summer's morning out in a neighbour's back garden. It is Al's (Reilly) garden in which Pencil is found, dialogue with the man revealing he too lost a dog when he was very young and helped combat it by maintaining an interest in hunting. Briefly, the film' hypothesis rears up and it is no mystery as to why the scenes with Al work as well as they do, with this idea of grief, and ways in which to deal with grief, simmering beneath a surface while never fully blooming out into a constructed whole.

What follows is a film essentially showing to us why it is that, at least socially, our Peggy could never quite hit it off with humans and found such solace with animals. She comes to occupy lonely places peppered with bright hues of colour; breaks at work scored with music you'd more than likely hear rolling out over a baby's crib as a parent attempts to get them to fall asleep, very much instilling a certain child-like sensibility about her. We observe Peggy effectively begin her life anew, the death of Pencil the upsetting of the established norm and systematically launching her out onto a slide downwards in psychological well-being when she is forced from beginning again at the bottom in acquiring a new dog and rebuilding. Trips to family members Bret and Pier feel unnecessary; the mutual affiliation she has with Newt (Sarsgaard), a pound working animal specialist, are tied up in there somewhere while a sub-plot to do with co-worker Layla's man having an affair known only to Peggy is dropped in for good measure.

On the overly positive side, Shannon does well to carry the film; doing so with that look about her face, that expression which constantly suggests a deeper, more unremitting sense of tragedy and pain beneath an exterior which you could be told is one of a joyous person, and yet still be moved to ask questions. She has something going about her alluding to stark emotion just waiting to explode out of her that has, so far, been repressed. Things connect and link up with one another uneasily in Year of the Dog, and the electricity is only sporadic in its arriving to the forefront; the idea of the grief and confusion born out of the death of a pet not working quite so well as other ideas did in the aforementioned examples, but making for a film straddling a line between blackly comedic urban drama and a flat-out tragedy asking us to just break down at get seriously upset. Over it looms the ghost of Jeunet's 2001 film Amélie, and while at times its politically imbued content gets the better of it, often forcing it to come across as a Vegan convert video or a self-aware animal rights promotional film, it holds up its end neatly enough.

"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...

Most Americans have at one point in their lives experienced love for a dog or a cat. This movie captures that feeling and yet it shows what can happen when a person lets this love become all consuming and it does a great job. This is my personal favorite movie of 2007.

The characters that make up the movie are caricatures but yet they represent something real in all of us and and the themes in the movie accurately capture many issues that Americans face in contemporary society. What I like best is that "dog haters", if such people exist, will find much to enjoy in the movie as well. This is because the dark side of animal love is given equal time and thought as is given to the beauty of giving your heart and soul fully to the love of animals. Moreover, the main character is as easy to laugh at as to cry with.

This isn't some silly comedy like most of the other movies with dog in the title which are all in my opinion dogs. This is a black comedy with penetrating insights into issues that have a lot of proponents on opposite sides of a long spectrum. If you like to see a movie where you can check your brain in at the ticket booth then this one is probably not for you. If you like to be enlightened as well as entertained, check this out because in addition to giving the viewer a well thought out look at canine animals, this film is a brilliant portrayal of the psychology of the human animal as well.

I am actually tempted to call it "heartwarming" though I've never used that term to compliment a film. Each character is a balance between an exaggerated stereotype and frighteningly accurate portrayal. White treats his characters with subtlety and respect while allowing them to be as ridiculous as we modern humans are. Laura Dern is a genius with her painful and precise rendition of a sterile post-modern mother. As are all the leads; wonderful to see so-called "character actors" given space to breathe. If you were looking for "school of rock" or "orange county" you may be disappointed, but if you were intrigued and moved by "chuck & buck" "year of the dog" might hit the mark. This film felt, at times, reminiscent of the work of Todd Solondz, in that the characters can be both absurd and realistic simultaneously, and (as I see it) both directors are careful to avoid exploiting their characters. White's story is more traditional and warm than most of Solondz's work, though, many viewers will likely find "dog" exclusively "too depressing" or just "funny", and probably not "funny" enough.

Overall: Really lovely and well crafted little film that is both serious and silly, without being melodramatic or wacky: a triumph considering the subject matter. It has already landed a spot near the top of my short list of favorite recent films (its a desert out there these days, this is a glass of pink lemonade).