The funniest shot in Todd Solondz’s bleak comedy Wiener-Dog comes early on: a lovingly confected tracking shot, reminiscent of similar ones throughout the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. Except that, instead of capturing a body of water containing meaningful bits of Tarkovskian detritus, Solondz’s cameraman Ed Lachman brings all his skill – and some exquisite Chopin-style piano – to bear on a lengthy trail of bright orange dachshund diarrhoea. Much as we might expect from the acerbic, pessimistic director of Welcome To The Dollhouse.
Cinematic snobs will also note Wiener-Dog’s structural affinities with Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, in which a Christ-like donkey endures the seven deadly sins and a lonely, very French-Catholic death on a hillside, surrounded by sheep. In Wiener-Dog, there is the same succession of indifferent, brutish or over-indulgent owners, with the titular hound as a more obvious pass-the-parcel narrative device – but with a far less exultant end for our beast of burden (dog-lovers are duly warned).
Solondz’s impassive, deadpan dachshund floats from one faux-family to another after we first meet her at her sad adoption shelter. She is variously named “Doo-doo” and “Cancer” by those owners – Greta Gerwig, Ellen Burstyn – who can be bothered. Her stoicism and dependency are set against the angry, broken people who adopt her, the usual carnival of Solondz weirdos, creeps, victims and losers. As she sits silently among them, they play their human power games, make each other miserable, use one another and ignore their pet-owning responsibilities.
“It’s a kind of civilising – so they act like humans,” says one character of the process of housebreaking the dog. Given how the humans in the movie behave, you have to see this as an abusive development, or simply as evidence that Solondz’s mordant misanthropy hasn’t faded one iota.
And that misanthropy, which often feels unearned, even faintly pornographic, is for me an abiding issue with Solondz’s work. He likes to press his thumb into all our freshest emotional bruises, with diminishing results as the movie rolls along – and perhaps likewise in his career as a whole. Here, his lightest touches are the most pleasing, from a witty Incredible Journey-style montage of a cross-country canine trudge during an audacious fake “Intermission” sequence, to the credits font lifted from John Waters’s Desperate Living.
But among the unhappy humans, Solondz seems trapped, wallowing in the same miserabilist whirlpool of his own devising, with no noticeable cinematic growth.
