Todd Solondz’s ‘Wiener-Dog’ puts humanity in a tragicomic cage
MOVIE REVIEW
“Wiener-Dog”
Grade: B
Starring Greta Gerwig, Julie Delpy and Kieran Culkin. Directed by Todd Solondz.
Rated R for language and some disturbing content. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 33 minutes.
Bottom line: A dog goes to four different owners, revealing traits in mankind along the way
Nothing softens up a hard-hearted auteur quite like the presence of a beloved animal.
“Wiener-Dog,” Todd Solondz’s barbed and beguiling canine odyssey in four parts, may be the exception that proves the rule. A writer-director known for his confrontational, harshly funny dissections of American middle-class life, including “Happiness” (1998), “Storytelling” (2001) and “Dark Horse” (2011), Solondz is not entirely immune to the charms of the beautiful brown dachshund he’s placed front and center here. But he never lets those charms distract him from the dog’s chief purpose, which is to bear witness to a rich and appalling spectrum of human idiocy, misery and self-absorption. She is both man’s best friend and a stark reminder that mankind is its own worst enemy.
The dachshund’s first master is a 9-year-old boy and cancer survivor named Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke), who names her Wiener-Dog. Remi loves his new pet, but his miserable parents (Tracy Letts and Julie Delpy) don’t exactly share his affection, especially after Wiener-Dog ingests a granola bar and relieves herself all over their attractively furnished suburban home.
A medical detour sends our four-legged heroine off on her next adventure, now in the company of a lonely veterinary assistant (Greta Gerwig) and her junkie-drifter friend (Kieran Culkin) as they head out on a road trip to Ohio.
After a cross-country intermission that affords the film’s sole moments of unalloyed pleasure, Wiener-Dog is the companion of Dave Schmerz, a failed Hollywood screenwriter and widely derided film-school professor played to misanthropic sad-sack perfection by Danny De Vito.
Wiener-Dog’s last and most indelible adventure involves a cranky shut-in (Ellen Burstyn), who pays little heed to either the dachshund or the sudden arrival of her talkative granddaughter (Zosia Mamet), paying one of her irregular visits to ask for money. In juxtaposing Mamet’s pathetic prattling and Burstyn’s cold-shoulder routine, Solondz somehow arrives at a piercing vision of two women in a state of shared yet unbridgeable despair. It’s the only one of the four stories that seems to invite the question: How did these people get here?
Whatever the answers to these questions, the director at least has the integrity to subject himself to similar scrutiny. For all the relish with which Solondz sends up both the Hollywood studios and the independent film community that has supported him over the years, Dave Schmerz is not the character he most seems to identify with. That would be an artist who goes by the name of Fantasy (Michael James Shaw), whose work we later see consists of meticulously reproduced imitations of life, trapped under glass and displayed for all to see.
The final image could be Solondz’s acknowledgment of the diorama-like limitations of his own art, or it could just be his latest epitaph for all humanity: Welcome to the doghouse.
