Andrew reviews the misanthropic director's latest provocation.
Todd Solondz, that self-proclaimed misanthropic,
pessimistic provocateur who uses candy colored visions of deathly dark comedy
to express often disturbing visions, is back with his most
episodic narrative since his 2004 shocker Palindromes. The poster, title and tonality of his
anthological rumination on depressed mortality, Wiener-Dog, like his other films has the surface appeal of a plasticine
rom-com which can fool some into thinking they bought a ticket to My Dog Skip but the heart and soul of a
bitter, angry man. While not as
compelling as his previous works, this star studded ensemble piece consisting
of four disparate stories linked by the titular canine in question marks yet
another snide auto-critique in the provocateur’s filmography that is at once
despondent and oddly hilarious with particular emphasis on his own twisted take
on Kids Say the Darndest Things. Not since Storytelling
has the director gone so far out of his way to critique the state of
filmmaking affairs with not one but two episodes focusing on the facile
attitude of filmmaking and art in general.
It also manages to cram in some of his most disgusting canine jokes
since the finale of his still greatest work, Happiness. 
Reuniting with Life
During Wartime and Ken Park cinematographer
Ed Lachman, the film opens on a striking, sickly looking bright green/yellow
image of the titular wiener dog in a cage as the opening credits silently roll
over the sounds of dogs barking and howling from their pound cages. Giving the impression of imprisonment which
will progress further as the canine is transported from owner to owner over the
course of the movie, this one shot sets the tone for Solondz’s tightly
constructed exercise in cynicism. As
with his previous films, it all looks and sounds like a family entertainment but
digs it’s enraged claws deep into viewers’ respective psyches with a unique
brand of transgression that is unmistakably Solondz’s. Fans of the director however, who always find
something to laugh at no matter how horrible the circumstances, are likely to
come away underwhelmed by Wiener-Dog which
bottles in all of the director’s hate but never transgresses beneath the skin
in the ways Happiness and Palindromes do. The first two stories, including a
veterinarian nurse named Dawn (Greta Gerwig) hitchhiking with a drug addict
named Brandon (Kieran Culkin) are fairly hopeful meditations on adolescence
where the last two concerning a screenwriting professor named Dave Schmerz
(Danny DeVito’s most depressing performance yet) and an elderly walker-bound
Nana (Ellen Burstyn) are bound to drain dry whatever life and happiness you
have left in your blood.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki