I heard a lot of reviewers explicitly spoiled this movie to keep some animal lovers from seeing this film. I only do so for the sake of analysis as it’s difficult to dig into a project of Todd Solondz’s without doing so. At that note, this review (but more analysis) explicitly spoils Wiener Dog. SHORT VERSION: A little bland because of one of the central themes and the way it reflects on the acting, but other than that overall one of the most potent movies I’ve seen in awhile. If you can laugh at something horrible happening to a wiener dog, and also be very sad toward that then you’re the person for this movie. If you love dogs? Don’t bother. Wiener Dog might just be Todd Solondz messing with us. That’s something that can be stood by. That’s not bad, in fact, Solondz’s crazy, depressing, and funny style has always been doing just that, I was just stating the ground rules here. The movie follows a wiener dog who goes through 4 different owners, each revealing something about life in the 21rst century. So let’s set up more ground rules. The point of “animal” movies is to make us emote through the animal, and Wiener Dog starts off by letting us stare at the dog itself and realize that. However, soon the dog leaves the focus of the movie and the people who are affected by the dog become more of the focus. Solondz structuring the beginning of the film like this is smart as it allows us to get into the mind space of emoting to the dog and then throws the humans into the movie quickly so we start to do the exact same thing to them. There’s a sense of deceit to the way that he alters our view of the world and then serves up his view on it through the stories. The first concerns a small boy and his pair of despicable parents. This is showing how a smaller character can be abused without ever really knowing it. Julie Delpy, deliciously evil, as the mother explains to her cancer survivor 9-year old that the dog may very well have emotions, but it still must be treated like a dog. The father explains how “we need to break the will” of such animals. But aren’t they just talking about the boy? That’s the trick. This scene started all about the dog, but now you’re projecting the feeling that you would have on the dog to the boy because the dog is nowhere to be seen. The parents for good or ill are trying to break in their son, by telling nasty stories (seriously, Delpy gets some hilariously sardonic milage), and keeping him in a place where he can’t do anything. Sure, it’s all for the best but what about the boy? What about the dog? That’s the question that this section brings up. There’s a sadness and a depth to it all, but the film’s indefinite problem rears its head during this as well. The projection is so necessary that the actors almost become blank slates much like the animals in these movies often become. The acting is fine, just a little flat (except in one section of the movie, but that comes later). This first section makes one question the whole stability of the systems we have for taking care of pets, and the way that parents shelter their children. It’s an important topic that Solondz executes well even if it did compel a sense of depression. But that’s what this movie runs on. The lofty ideas that almost always inspire depression. The mix of nostalgia and happiness and the other darker feelings that follow these when you realize that you won’t get what you want. This brings us to Dawn Wiener, who was the protagonist of Solondz’s masterpiece, Welcome to the Dollhouse. In the context of Dollhouse this section of the film is tear inducing, attempting to approach the meaning of the dog in a different way. It draw parallels between the feelings of nostalgia that the wiener dog, herself embodies, as the childhood dog you’d never forget, and the nostalgia of never being happy because you were robbed the ability to properly comprehend adult life because you were introduced to all that stuff in middle school, and now you can’t feel anything or understand it. Gerwig’s construction of Dawn is so vivid that I was able to describe the entire heartfelt motivation of her character in detail right there. This part of the movie got to me. Dawn and Branden (another Dollhouse character, played here by Kieran Culkin) are on a road trip, and he doesn’t know that she’s in love with him. It’s the type of almost cheap gimmick that seems to strive for your heart and it got mine. I suppose lacking the context of Welcome to the Dollhouse the sequence would play less emotional, but nonetheless, the sequence is incredible, playing to all kinds of tearful looking back. There’s a recurring song, sung throughout it that makes one think of better times, and happier places, and the way Solondz plays the idea of the American road trip, and the idea of the collapse of the American ideal against that in just a few scenes is mesmerizing and traumatizing. Thinking onto the later sections of the movie, Solondz might be making fun of all of us for believing in that American ideal, like the representation of the feeling of nostalgia that the wiener dog is, is a lie, and that now all we have to do is look into the people to notice the bitterness… I’m getting a little overblown here, though. Point is, the Dawn Wiener section of this movie is heartbreaking, and Gerwig is so realistic and moving that I doubt there’ll be a better performance by an actress this year. The fake idealism comes up again in an interview in the third section of the film which follows a screenwriting professor played by Danny Devito. The scene concerns a student in an interview for the school, and he’s answering in completely broad terms as if he doesn’t understand what he’s getting into, blindly wanting to make movies because THAT SOUNDS GOOD. The parallel to how Solondz may look at how my generation approaches the coming years of our lives in what is ultimately a collapsing country is highlighted here, and the way that Solondz eventually uses a terrorist attack to represent the ideals that may have eventually destroyed that American ideal once and for all is gloriously blatant. Plus, the image of a man in a bomb suit crawling up to a wiener dog in a yellow dress with a bomb strapped to it is downright the funniest thing you’ll see all year. It’s interesting how the movie accepts all of this and then finally, and damningly takes the piss out of itself by condemning the negativity that it’s almost all about. Ellen Burstyn is a blinded woman with cancer who is visited by her niece. Her life is structured almost like a prison, and the final place she has to escape to (a forest behind her house because the rest of her world has been industrialized) is haunting her. What specifically is? Versions of her younger self, each a little bit different. This is you if….this is you if… The point, though? All of these versions are better versions of herself. This is a sad moment, especially since you can tell by the money that the woman seems to have and the very protected shrine of a house she has that she must have either married into a capitalist run family or just gone and done it herself sacrificing happiness, (no that is not saying that capitalism is bad, simply saying that people with lots of money probably sacrifice a lot to secure such money) but it’s also a moment of optimism on how we can all improve ourselves and create a better world. MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD IF YOU’VE GOTTEN THIS FAR. And then the dog runs down the hill the house is on, and is hit by a truck….and then a car, and then another car, and then another car, and then another car. The optimism of the idea of old world industrialism makes one think about what these cars may mean. Considering what specific models the cars are they seem to be ones that glorify industrialism: A truck, a yellow sports car, a minivan. It possibly could be about how the whole damn thing is self-defeating and will ultimately destroy itself. The film ends with the dog having been turned into a taxidermic art piece, that can turn its head and bark at us as it stares directly into us. The face of everything that the movie is criticizing is now staring at us in all its artificial glory and suddenly...barking. Wiener Dog is not great because of these deeper meanings. Really the acting problem takes a good chunk out of the movie, but they certainly makes the movie mean more. Solondz could be just messing with us of course as I covered earlier, though. Honestly, I will not be surprised if many don’t subscribe to the film's depressing world view, but it was quite entertaining in my opinion. Wiener Dog gets an 8 out of 10.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |