Wiener-Dog | Little White Lies

Wiener-Dog

11 Aug 2016 / Released: 12 Aug 2016

Young boy in light-coloured clothes playing a musical instrument, gazing at a caged dog.
Young boy in light-coloured clothes playing a musical instrument, gazing at a caged dog.
4

Anticipation.

Todd Solondz’s films are often furry good.

3

Enjoyment.

Woof!

3

In Retrospect.

Looking bark, some great tails in there.

Gre­ta Ger­wig pro­vides the spark in Amer­i­can nihilist Todd Solondz’s unof­fi­cial sequel to Wel­come to the Dollhouse.

Nerd los­er extra­or­di­naire Dawn Wiener first appeared in Todd Solondz’s 1995 film, Wel­come to the Doll­house. For­tu­nate­ly, her return in the director’s lat­est, Wiener-Dog, is no sen­ti­men­tal homage. Indeed, recent­ly asked whether he was wor­ried the new film would tar­nish Dawn’s lega­cy, Solondz reject­ed the notion, explain­ing that Dawn is, just a char­ac­ter’, and one towards whom he didn’t feel any great sense of responsibility.

Gre­ta Gerwig’s take on Dawn has more in com­mon with her char­ac­ter from Frances Ha than it does with the orig­i­nal incar­na­tion. Ani­mat­ed by an admirable and touch­ing sense of moral duty and opti­mism, she hero­ical­ly faces up to seem­ing­ly insur­mount­able cir­cum­stances, striv­ing to com­mu­ni­cate with peo­ple whose cru­el­ty appears, in turn, to be con­ceal­ing pro­found melan­choly and pain.

Yet it’s the epony­mous dog that links the sto­ries and char­ac­ters. The film opens with a ref­er­ence to dogs as man’s best friend, and the pro­gres­sion from one seg­ment to the next is in turn dic­tat­ed by the dog’s move­ment and by how will­ing the char­ac­ters are to treat the dog in accor­dance with that state­ment. In Solondz’s cru­el, nihilis­tic world, the utter­ance of such a well-inten­tioned and cliched idea can only infer immi­nent suf­fer­ing for the dog. The cul­mi­na­tion of the first sto­ry, depict­ing an out­right rejec­tion of the dog by a typ­i­cal sub­ur­ban fam­i­ly, proves to be one of the film’s most suc­cess­ful, amus­ing and bleak moments.

Yet the piece­meal struc­ture of the film dilutes any sus­tained emo­tion­al invest­ment. Too long to be approached as episodes, too short to com­plete­ly get past the almost pat Solondz-isms, they seem much more pow­er­ful in iso­la­tion. The jux­ta­po­si­tion of sto­ries appears increas­ing­ly arbi­trary and they don’t build up to any­thing par­tic­u­lar­ly mean­ing­ful. Although pro­ceed­ings seem to grav­i­tate towards the promise of more and more cru­el­ty, dis­ap­point­ment and, in the end, death, this devel­op­ment appears arti­fi­cial and forced.

Wiener-Dog nev­er­the­less remains enjoy­able as a series of unre­lat­ed but strik­ing vignettes. Solondz reminds us with Gerwig’s sequence that he mas­tered the for­mu­la for dis­agree­able awk­ward­ness long before it (and Ger­wig) became a manda­to­ry con­ven­tion of Amer­i­can indie cin­e­ma. His char­ac­ter­is­tic sense for well placed moments of phys­i­cal vio­lence also remains intact, as does his tal­ent for cre­at­ing three dimen­sion­al char­ac­ters who are like­able and pathet­ic in equal mea­sure. The film is worth watch­ing alone for Tra­cy Letts’ per­for­mance as an awful LA dad, and for Ellen Burstyn, who brings lev­i­ty and dark humour to a cli­mac­tic sequence that bor­ders on the macabre.

Indeed, it is the per­for­mances which bring this com­i­cal­ly abstract­ed ver­sion of the Todd Solondz film uni­verse to life. And yet, reduced to their bare ele­ments – cyn­i­cism, heart­break, cru­el­ty and vio­lence – the char­ac­ter­i­sa­tions lack a human touch. The sim­plic­i­ty means that the film is more suc­cess­ful as an exer­cise in style than it is as a grip­ping obser­va­tion of the real world. While Doll­house and 1998’s Hap­pi­ness were sim­i­lar­ly con­cerned with blink­ered char­ac­ters – self-cen­tred some­times to the point of mad­ness – Wiener-Dog push­es this fur­ther as it adopts the rather lim­it­ing and absur­dist point of view of the tit­u­lar dog, a detached, whim­per­ing observer.

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