B+
Mike White is one of the most original comic voices in American cinema today; in his most personal work, like “Chuck & Buck” (2000), he blended quirky humor and dark undercurrents with near brilliance, and even in more formulaically studio product like “School of Rock,” he added a distinctively quirky tone. In this picture—the first he’s directed as well as written—his odd, almost perverse perspective is very much in evidence. And “Year of the Dog” proves to be marvelously off-the-wall, in a delightfully deadpan way. But while very funny, it also has a hint of the tragic to it. It’s an extraordinary blend of the humorous and the sad.
It’s also perfectly cast. Sad-faced Molly Shannon, of “Saturday Night Live” fame, stars as Peggy, a mousy secretary who’s anxious to please everyone—her insecure, needy boss Robin (Josh Pais); her best friend, the volatile, man-hungry Layla (Regina King); and her brother Pier (Thomas McCarthy) and Bret (Laura Dern), his opinionated wife, as well as their little daughter Lissie (Amy and Zoe Schlagel), who blurts out sometimes embarrassing questions. But the real center of her life is her adorable little beagle, Pencil.
Unfortunately, the pooch perishes one unhappy night, sending Peggy into an emotional tailspin. A halting date with grubby next-door neighbor Al (John C. Reilly) turns out badly indeed when their interests prove at odds (to say the least), and though things seem much more promising with animal shelter activist Newt (Peter Sarsgaard), who provides her with a new, much more difficult, dog to raise, that relationship ends up stillborn as well. No wonder that she goes a bit off track, taking in a passel of mongrels slated to be put down at the pound, playing fast and loose with office funds to aid animal shelters, getting into trouble with her relatives when she baby-sits her niece on New Year’s Eve, and really getting into it with Al. And yet it may just prove that the extreme is exactly where she needs to go.
White’s script blends a dour sense of humor with serious undertones, and his writing is carefully calibrated to make his characters both weirdly funny and genuinely pathetic, often in a single breath. And while he fashions some quirkily hilarious situations, they alternate with others that are equally touching, even melancholy. And his curiously static, lapidary directing style, which plays everything without frills and seems deliberately to avoid shots in which people conversing are in the same frame (preferring instead to cut from one speaker to another to accentuate the characters’ sense of isolation even in a crowd), accentuates the off-kilter quality of the writing. He’s encouraged his technical team to complement his approach by keeping the look of the picture simple and spare, avoiding the usual Hollywood slickness.
It’s an attitude that White’s also communicated to his cast. Shannon, scrunching up her face into comic contortions, makes Peggy both amusing and pitiful, and she’s well contrasted with the men in her life: Pais’ nervous but ambitious boss, Reilly’s laid-back neighbor with his penchant for hunting, and especially Sarsgaard’s oddly principled Newt, at once curiously admirable but preternaturally single-minded. And Dern contributes a well-calibrated portrait of a fanatical wife and mother intent on adherence to her strange notions of familial (and social) perfection.
Reaction to “Year of the Dog” is likely to split between detractors who may dismiss it as a celebration of those they deride as wacko animal-lovers—the pro-PETA movie par excellence—and those who understand it as a sweetly empathetic study of society’s emotional fringe-dwellers, whatever their peculiar hangups. If you can tune onto the Mike White wavelength, you should find it a small jewel.