Year of the Dog

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 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.

This was probably not a good movie for me to watch. I have had to put two dogs down and one just died on me. If you are out digging a grave at 5.am., bawling your eyes out, then you know what someone goes through when they lose a pet.

So, I could empathize with Peggy (Molly Shannon) and see how she could be easily swayed by Newt (Peter Sarsgaard). She was vulnerable and was easily pushed over the deep end.

It is unrealistic to think that friends, family, and co-workers will be so understanding. That only happens in the movies.

But, it was nice to see her follow her passion. That was the plus of the movie that focused just a bit too much on animal abuse.

This is not a comedy. It's actually a rather complicated movie. If you're interested in seeing Molly Shannon make goofy faces, you probably should skip it. As it is, she does a rather admirable job of portraying someone who is finally finding herself.

Molly Shannon, as Peggy, finds out about the way animals are treated in the food industry and decides to go vegan. Like many new converts, however, she is overzealous and confused. Frankly, she does some really horrible things in her quest to find peace with her new beliefs. This made me rather uncomfortable. As a vegan, I was concerned: Director Mike White is known for making characters who are less-than-perfect, but what if viewers don't realize that? What if they think we're supposed to admire this woman? We aren't, obviously. The director is mostly vegan himself, and it's clear that he is aware of a lot of the struggles one goes through as a whole new world opens up. Peggy, who I ASSUME we're supposed to realize is already a little off-balance, responds by going a little psychotic.

But by the end of the film, she is finally finding peace with herself. It's a pleasant and inspiring ending and somewhat redeems the awful things she's done...not quite enough, in my opinion, if only for a viewing public who may already be confused about what it means to be vegan.

Would I recommend this movie? Yes, if you think you can go in and appreciate it on its merits without being biased as to whether veganism is right or wrong. That isn't the point of the thing--it's a coming-of-age movie about a middle-aged woman. Like I said earlier, it's basically a movie about finding oneself.

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.