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April 27, 2007
Year of the Dog
(out of four)
In Year of the Dog, director Mike White willfully violates one of the great unwritten rules of Hollywood screenwriting: Kill as many human characters as you want, just spare the dog. Take a movie like Independence Day, a textbook example that entertains by wiping entire cities off the face of the Earth, but in one key scene, concentrates all the audience's emotions on the fate of a single pooch.
Three dogs die in Year of the Dog, and White genuinely seems to care about each one. The movie, in fact, marks an ambitious attempt on his part to wrestle the challenges and contradictions facing those who empathize with animals, tackling all causes, from hunting and pharmaceutical testing to wearing furs and eating meat. The problem is that White shows considerably less respect toward people.
His misanthropic attitude reveals itself from frame one as Pencil, a well-loved beagle, frolics at the dog park while his owner, a middle-age and middle-class yuppie named Peggy, watches with radiant approval. Peggy is played by Molly Shannon, a gifted comic who, bless her heart, is not an actress — satire comes naturally, but sincere emotion falls beyond her range. When White cuts to a close-up of her face, the expression is not that of a genuine dog lover, but the caricature of such a person.
From the selection of Peggy's lonely-girl wallpaper to her brother Pier's belt-mounted BlackBerry holster, Year of the Dog is all caricature. Peggy embodies White's fantasies of how a profoundly lonely woman might behave, translating Pencil's death (which occurs before the audience has time to identify with her feelings for him) into pathological animal activism. Next-door neighbor Al (John C. Reilly) signifies the redneck callousness of a sport-hunting nut. And best friend Layla (Regina King), lovesick and tacky, rings as outrageously misrepresentative of the average African-American woman as Napoleon Dynamite's LaFawnduh.
Though directors Miguel Arteta and Richard Linklater brought humanism to earlier White scripts The Good Girl and School of Rock, his own impulses lie at the opposite extreme. Plenty of audiences share White's everyday disdain, but it makes for a nebbishy, Todd Solondz-style approach to storytelling, right down to the anti-social way he films casual conversations. By directing the actors to stare directly into the camera, White turns every encounter into an awkward experience, like being caught in a grueling job interview.
Only Peter Sarsgaard, as a shelter worker who fixes Peggy up with a high-maintenance replacement dog, manages to create something resembling a real person, an attempt White clearly discourages by naming the poor schmuck "Newt." It's a shame, since the director has conceived an ideal platform to examine the vegan zeitgeist from a place of personal experience. But he extends no such courtesy to his characters, reducing them to clichés even as he mourns the passing of each dead dog. There are those who believe empathy is the quality that separates man from beast, but what does it say that White directs his compassion exclusively toward animals?
[as featured in The Miami Herald]
Posted by Peter Debruge on