Movie Review: Wiener-Dog

Wiener-Dog

Directed by: Todd Solondz.

Written by: Todd Solondz.

Starring: Keaton Nigel Cooke (Remi), Tracy Letts (Danny), Julie Delpy (Dina), Greta Gerwig (Dawn Wiener), Kieran Culkin (Brandon), Connor Long (Tommy), Bridget Brown (April), Charlie Tahan (Warren), Danny DeVito (Dave Schmerz), Patrick Caroll Jr. (Garrett), Molly Gray (Ariadne), Ari Graynor (Carol Steinhart), Kett Turton (Director), Ellen Burstyn (Nana), Marcella Lowery (Yvette), Zosia Mamet (Zoe), Michael James Shaw (Fantasy), Melo Ludwig (Young Nana). 

 

Todd Solondz is one of the most uncompromising directors currently at work. His breakout film, Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996) and its follow-up, Happiness (1998), were both huge critical hits, and established his brand of mixing humor and empathy with characters you normally would not want to emphasize with. His films make you uncomfortable because of their subject matter – which most often touches upon life in suburbia, and deeply troubled families. A trademark of his films is often very uncomfortable conversations between children and their parents – where the children ask earnest, honest questions, and are given horrifying answers. For reasons I still don’t entirely understand, starting with Storytelling (2001) – his follow-up to Happiness – Solon’s films haven’t gotten quite the same degree of attention and critical love as his previous films. Perhaps some see him as a one-trick pony, repeating himself time and again, but I still find his films provocative, uncomfortably funny, and deeply empathetic to his characters, even if many of them are bad people. Palindromes (2004) in particular is an under seen and underrated film. There seems to be longer and longer between his films in recent years – perhaps an indication of funding issues, but aside from his last film, 2011’s Dark Horse, he has yet to make a film I didn’t really like. With Wiener-Dog, he is back on track.

 

The film is really a quartet of short stories that are not centered on the title character – an adorable wiener dog, but rather are about its various owners. The film contains perhaps the most hopeful conclusion to a story Solondz has ever filmed – but that’s at the half way point of the film – from there, he plunges us into abject sorrow and heartbreak, in a way that only he can (the fact that the hope is broken from the despair by an intermission – including a jaunty song, is kind of brilliant).

 

The first story is about Remi (Keaton Nigel Cook) – a boy of about 10, a cancer survivor, whose father (Tracy Letts) gives him the wiener dog as a pet, much to his mother’s (Julie Delphy’s) chagrin. She pretty much hates the dog, and it isn’t long before her husband has come to despise it as well. But for little Remi, Wiener-Dog is the best pet he could ask for – and he adores her. There is a classic Solondz scene in the car between the Remi and his mother as they are taking the dog to the vet to get fixed over just why that needs to be done – with Delphy delivering a brilliant performance as she sympathetically explains that if the dog doesn’t get fixed, it will likely be raped and murdered (by a foreign dog, who shouldn’t even be there in the first place, of course). There is another scene that mirrors this one later, about death – after Remi makes the mistake of giving the dog something that causes diarrhea, which is the last straw for his father.

 

The second story is the one that is actually full of hope. It stars Greta Gerwig as a grown up version of Dawn Wiener, from Welcome to the Dollhouse (and back from the dead, as we saw her funeral in 2004’s Palindromes). Life hasn’t turned out that well for Dawn – she’s an assistant at the vet, who takes the dog before it can be killed, but doesn’t appear to have much else going on, and is as awkward and lonely as ever. Then she meets Brandon – the bully from Welcome to the Dollhouse, who had threatened to rape her, before the two ended up in some sort of weird, quasi-relationship. In Welcome to the Dollhouse, their story ends when Brandon runs away – and Dawn realizes that his home life is even worse than hers was. In Wiener-Dog though, Solondz grants these characters at least hope for a better future. Dawn has seemingly gotten away from her messed up family, and Brandon is, at the very least, trying to set his life straight by the end. Their segment ends with hope – something Solondz rarely does.

 

It’s from this point on however, that Solondz truly plunges the audience into despair – with two stories that offer no real hope. The first is about Dave Schmerz (Danny DeVito – giving his best performance in years) – a sad sack screenwriter who hasn’t had much success, who now teaches at a film school, where he has to suffer through the smirking and mockery or a younger generation, who do not want to listen to him. Schmerz is a sympathetic character to be sure – but Solondz also makes it clear that he is a hack – a writer who wants to do something true and honest, but ends up selling out, to include a bunch of shtick in his work – which still doesn’t get him anywhere closer to success either. He is a classic Solondz character in many respects, and the segment ends right where it should.

 

The final segment is about a grandmother (Ellen Burstyn), who receives a visit for her granddaughter (Zosia Mamet) – who she hasn’t seen in years, and her artist boyfriend, Fantasy (Michael James Shaw). The grandmother knows why her granddaughter is visiting – for money – and she makes no real effort to hide her feelings from her. If the granddaughter is a spoiled, entitled millennial, than the grandmother is a miserable person – who has named the dog Cancer. The film takes a surreal turn near the end – which works brilliantly – before coming to an ending that is absolutely pitiless.

 

Wiener-Dog is a film, ultimately, about the inescapability of death. The characters in the film try, but know that ultimately, they cannot escape the same fate as the rest of us. They are selfish in many ways – assholes and sad sacks, incapable of change even if they want to. The film isn’t quite the masterpiece that Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness or Palindromes are. Those films push deeper into their characters, and in the case of Palindromes, is a slippery moral puzzle, where Solondz is constantly pulling the rug out from underneath the audience – forcing us to change our minds from scene to scene. What Wiener-Dog is though is a return to form for Solondz, after the misfire of Dark Horse, and an unapologetic one. Say what you will about Solondz – he isn’t about to become David Schmerz.

Movie Review: Dark Horse

Dark Horse **
Directed by: Todd Solondz.
Written by: Todd Solondz.
Starring: Jordan Gelber (Abe), Selma Blair (Miranda), Christopher Walken (Jackie), Justin Bartha (Richard), Zachary Booth (Justin), Mia Farrow (Phyllis), Aasif Mandvi (Mahmoud).

Note: I saw Todd Solondz’ Dark Horse at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. I haven’t heard that he made any changes to since then, but thought I should mention it anyway in case he did.

Todd Solondz is one of the most interesting, provocative filmmakers in the world right now. From Welcome to the Dollhouse to Happiness to Storytelling to Palindromes to Life During Wartime his films are all darkly comic moral puzzles where we are forced to reevaluate everything we think, sometimes from scene to scene. His characters are all on the outskirts of normal behavior, and he walks a fine line between mocking them and loving them. In short, his films have always been among the most interesting in any year they were released. Until his latest, Dark Horse, anyway, which is a major disappointment.

The film stars Jordan Gelber as Abe, a Jewish man living in New Jersey (where else?) who still lives at home with his parents, Jackie (Christopher Walken) and Phyllis (Mia Farrow). He even works for Jackie’s real estate company, although quite clearly, he has no idea what he’s doing. Everyone else shows up to work in suits and ties, and he shows up in shorts and the type of “witty” t-shirts most people stop wearing around the age of 17. This overweight, balding man in his early 30s is quite simply a pathetic loser – who views himself as a dark horse, which he pretty much has to since his brother is a doctor, and he hasn’t done anything with his life yet. If he doesn’t see himself as a dark horse, he’d have to admit he was a loser – and he cannot do that.

Abe meets Miranda (Selma Blair) at a wedding, and although she clearly doesn’t think much of him (they barely say a word to each other), he asks for her number, and stumped for an excuse, she gives it to him. She even agrees to go out with him when he calls, but when he shows up at her house (where she too, lives with her parents), she isn’t there. No matter – Abe waits in his behemoth, yellow eyesore of a Hummer until she gets home. Abe talks and talks and talks to Miranda, who barely responds, before, for some reason, he asks her to marry him. First she says no, and then a few days later, calls back and accepts. Why? Who the hell knows? I sure couldn’t figure it out. From there, dark secrets are revealed, and Abe starts disappearing into a fantasy world that involves him and his dad’s secretary. Abe isn’t sure that Miranda, who after all looks like Selma Blair, will actually go through with the marriage – or for that matter, if he will.

I have to admit – I have no idea just what exactly Solondz is going for in this movie. He has often stated in the past that some of his movies are in response to other films – moments in Storytelling take shots at American Beauty for example, and Palindromes, about abortion, has some things to say about Vera Drake. So perhaps Dark Horse is Solondz’s response to the recent spat of films about overgrown man children, who meet a beautiful, perfect woman, and somehow gets them to sleep with them, and the relationship forces them to grow up. I’m thinking in particular of Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, and you can see the parallels between the two films, although Solondz doesn’t view his main character as witty or funny, but just pathetic, and certainly does not view Miranda as the personification of female perfection like Katherine Heigl was in that film. And perhaps had Solondz followed this premise more precisely – and his film was funnier – it could have worked. But there were too many easy jokes – Walken and Farrow’s hairpieces for example – that quite simply fell flat. There is no real insight here, and Solondz isn’t really challenging the audience’s expectations, but is rather taken an easy way out.

It certainly doesn’t help that Jordan Gelber isn’t very good as Abe. He is such an obnoxious jerk, and not in a funny way, that you spend the whole movie wanting to get away from him – which is impossible since he’s in nearly every scene. Selma Blair fares better in perhaps a reprisal of her role in Storytelling (the IMDB lists he character name as Miranda, formerly Vi, which is what she was called in that film). There are certainly similarities between the two characters, and Blair nails the precise acting style required in a Solondz movie. But she’s the only one who does – and her character is underwritten.

As it stands, there are isolated moments in Dark Horse that work, but nothing to really sink your teeth into. Solondz has always embraced society’s so-called “losers”, and criticizes that society that that insists on dividing everyone in simplistic categories – with the “winners” usually being vain, superficial and cruel, where as the losers are more sympathetic – even when those people are perverts or pedophiles. But what divdes Dark Horse from the likes of Happiness is that I felt no sympathy for Abe. The situation he is in is completely of his own making – his lonliness is a result of him being an insufferable jerk. The movie becomes more surreal as it goes along, but it never really reveals an more depth to Abe – like Happiness did with the Jane Adams character, or poor Dawn Weiner in Welcome to the Dollhouse, the deluded suburbanites in Storytelling, the misguided teenager in Palindromes, or the sad sack pedophile getting out of jail in Life During Wartime. Solondz has always succeeded in making us care about characters that normally we would despise. But in Dark Horse, he never succeeds in making us care for Abe. Yes, society can be cruel by dividing everyone into winners and losers – but in the case of Abe, it isn’t untrue or unfair. You have to at least try to not be a jerk.

Movie Review: Life During Wartime

Life During Wartime ****
Directed By: Todd Solondz.
Written By: Todd Solondz
Starring: Shirley Henderson (Joy), Allison Janney (Trish), Ciarán Hinds (Bill), Paul Reubens (Andy), Michael K. Williams (Allen), Michael Lerner (Harvey), Dylan Riley Snyder (Timmy Maplewood), Ally Sheedy (Helen), Rich Pecci (Mark), Chris Marquette (Billy), Renée Taylor (Mona), Charlotte Rampling (Jacqueline).

Todd Solondz is one of the most original filmmakers working anywhere in the world today. His films all take place in a universe seemingly unto itself, with characters appearing in one movie after they were introduced in another. His films are mainly about extremely dysfunctional families, and often involve taboo bust conversations, and children placed in situations that we can barely believe we are seeing. The children in his films are not wide eyed innocents, but have been warped by their cluelessly cruel parents, and are in effect on their way to becoming monsters. In Solondz’s films, the sins of the parents are almost always visited upon they children. Oh, and all of his films are comedies – demented and dark comedies to be sure, but comedies nonetheless.

Life During Wartime takes place in the same universe as Solondz’s biggest hit – 1998’s Happiness. All of the major characters from that movie are back in this one (with a couple thrown in from his Welcome to the Dollhouse for good measure), but they are played by different actors. It doesn’t matter though. Like his previous film Palindromes – where he used 8 different actors to play a 13 year old girl who wants to become pregnant – these characters cannot change who they are no matter how different they look.

Like Happiness, Life During Wartime opens in a restaurant where Joy (here played by Shirley Henderson, taking over from Jane Adams) is eating with the sad sack man in her life, who tries to give her an ashtray with her name engraved on it. In Happiness, this was Andy (Jon Lovitz), who reacts harshly when Joy dumps him, and ends up committing suicide. (Andy returns several times in this movie as well as a ghost, and is played with scary skill by Paul “Pee Wee Herman” Reubens). This time though, the man who tries to give her the ashtray is Allen (Michael K. Williams taking over for Philip Seymour Hoffman), the phone sex freak in Happiness. The two have been married, and Allen says he has left all his addictions behind. But the waitress says differently, prompting Joy to leave Allen and travel from her hometown in New Jersey to Florida, where her mother and sister Trish (Allison Janney, taking over for Cynthia Stevenson) have relocated.

Trish has been able to put her life back together after her husband Bill (Ciaran Hinds taking over for Dylan Baker) was put in jail at the end of Happiness for pedophilia. She has told her young son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) that his father is dead. Trish has fallen for Harvey Wiener (Michael Lerner, who is playing the role that originated in Welcome to the Dollhouse), a devoted Jew who wants to be buried in Israel, despite never having been there before. In one of the films funniest, yet most shocking, scenes Trish confides in her young son that all Harvey has to do is touch her elbow and she becomes wet. Harvey is not especially attractive or rich, or young for that matter, but she is what Trish craves in a man – normal.

Meanwhile, Bill has been released from prison, and stalks through the movie almost silently. He visits the family’s new home in Florida – but only when they are not home. He picks up a woman (Charlotte Rampling) is a bar and takes her back to her hotel room. She catches him raiding her purse after they are done, and is offended and throws him out. He is not so much interested in sex with her, but he does need money. He then travels across country to Oregon to see his son Billy (Chris Marquette), now in university. In Happiness, perhaps the most memorable scene in the film comes when Bill confessed to Billy what he did to his friends at the sleepover. Perhaps the best scene in this movie is when the two of them talk – the conversation once again is not what we expect it to be.

Poor Joy. Along with Dawn Wiener from Welcome to the Dollhouse, she is the most sympathetic character in Solondz’s films. She is a nice person, unlike her sisters who are either obsessed with being normal (Trish) or else so self involved and egocentric – Helen (Ally Sheedy, brilliant in her one scene taking over for Lara Flynn Boyle), yet all she gets is dumped on by everyone. Her family considers her a failure, and then men in her life blame her for all of their failings. Andy comes back from the dead to haunt her, first seemingly being sweet, until she rejects him all over again, which makes him mean. Now Allen is blaming her for his own problems as well. It is no wonder that she is as meek as she is. In this film, Shirley Henderson plays Joy as a woman who is pretty much afraid to open her mouth – every time she does, all that happens is that she gets insulted. Already low on confidence in the first film, but this point she is almost destroyed.

In fact, we feel sorry for a lot of the characters in this movie. Poor Harvey, who does seem like a nice, normal guy in the film, but not as much. It is a testament to the strength of the film that perhaps the funniest scene in the movie is when Timmy mistakes Harvey for a pedophile. Only in a Solondz film would this even be attempted, let alone pulled off as brilliantly as it is. Harvey’s son Mark is back – even further gone done the road of misanthropy then he was in his one scene at the end of Palindromes. Even Bill the pedophile is portrayed with more complexity than most pedophiles get in the movies. Hinds plays him without judgment as a broken man, who knows he has made mistakes, and is still wondering about their consequences. He is much more sympathetic than his shallow, superficial ex-wife. Solondz even seems to hold his own profession up for ridicule when Helen arrives, having given up the glamorous world of poetry to become a Hollywood screenwriter, who is currently dating Keanu Reeves (who sadly, does not make a cameo). It is so hard to write a good screenplay that Joy could not possibly understand the stress and strain that Helen is under.

Solondz does not make it easy, either on his characters or his audience members. His films are often difficult to watch, so he is never really going to have a mainstream hit on his hands. In fact, many of the ardent supporters of his first two films – Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness – seem to have abandoned him on his two films after that (Storytelling and Palindromes). But for me, Solondz remains one of the most distinctive voices in American movies. His films challenge you to see things in a different way. His films may shock you, but they are always honest. Life During Wartime is one of the year’s best films, because Solondz takes risks, and pulls them brilliantly.

God and the Cinemas Part V: Todd Solondz

Todd Solondz is one of the most interesting filmmakers at work in the world today. In the mid to late 1990s, he was a critic’s favorite with back to back critic’s favorites Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness. Since then, however, he seems to have fallen out of critical favor, and I’m not exactly sure why. I thought his two films since Happiness, 2001’s Storytelling and 2004’s Palindromes were as strong as the two films that reaped all the critical huzzahs. Now apparently, Solondz is close to wrapping up his new film, a sort of quasi-sequel to Happiness, in which entirely new actors have been cast in each of the roles (including Paris Hilton, although no one is sure what role she played). This takes what Solondz did in Palindromes, a quasi-sequel in its own right of Welcome to the Dollhouse, seem almost quaint.

Solondz’s films are obviously a theater of cruelty, although unlike many critics, I have never thought that Solondz sits back and simply mocks his characters. In a strange way, he loves his characters. He screws with the audience much more than he screws with his characters – he sets up moral traps where we think we know what the right answer is, only to have the rug pulled out from under us at each stage.

Storytelling is an interesting movie to look at in terms of God and the cinema, because it casts different people in the role of “God” at different junctures. Not literally God of course, but as people who have power and control over their subjects.

In the first part of Storytelling, entitled fiction, Selma Blair plays a University Student in a creative writing class, with somewhat kinky sexual appetites. Her boyfriend has cerebral palsy, and although this used to be kinky enough for her, it isn’t anymore (“You don’t sweat when we have sex anymore”, her boyfriend complains). One night, she meets her professor (Robert Wisdom), a large African American man at a bar, and agrees to go with him. In a scene that got Solondz in trouble with the MPAA, Wisdom has anal sex with Blair while making her say “Nigger, fuck me hard”. She was drawn to him in part because of the stereotype of the “virile black man”, and he uses that to get her to come home with him, and then turns the tables – it is no longer her using him, but him using her. At first uncomfortable with what is going on, Blair slowly gets into it, and actually enjoys it, proven after the scene is over and she runs back to her boyfriend who tells her that she’s all sweaty.

Feeling guilty about what happened, Blair it into a short story for Wisdom’s class, but instead of making it the consensual sex it was, she turns it into a rape. The students proceed to rip apart her story as “unbelievable”, and when she protests that it actually happened; Wisdom calmly informs her “When you put it down on paper, it all becomes fiction”.

The second segment of the film, entitled “Non-Fiction” deals with a documentary filmmaker (Paul Giamatti) who is making a film about a Jewish family in New Jersey. The father (John Goodman) rages at the slightest provocation, the mother (Julie Hagerty) simply tries to get through the day. The oldest son (Mark Webber) wants to be a talk show host, and spends his days sullenly in his room. The middle son is a football star, who ends up in a coma. The youngest son manipulates the entire family, and plays games with their Spanish maid – cruel, nasty little games.

Most people think that in the second segment, that the Giamatti character represents Solondz. Solondz certainly wants you to think that way – as he cast perhaps the only actor who looks anything like Solondz, and then proceeded to make him look more that way. But I’m not so sure. The filmmaker is clueless at times, and prone to the type of filmmaking that Solondz in obviously mocking (there is a shot in the documentary of a bag blowing around, and the voiceover tells us how beautiful it is – obviously taking a shot at American Beauty). No, I think that if Solondz is anyone in that second half of the film, it’s the youngest son, who manipulates everyone into doing just what he wants them to do. He’s really the one in control, pulling the strings behind the scenes – much like Solondz is with the movie itself.

Storytelling is really about art – the motivations that drive it and the responsibilities the artist has to his creations, whether they are real or not. In their own way, each of the storytellers are playing God with their creations – they make them in their own image, show us only what they want us to know and control their fate.

Palindromes goes even farther than Storytelling does. In the film, a 13 year old girl gets pregnant, and is determined to keep her baby (that is after all, why she had sex in the first place). Her mother, Ellen Barkin, wants her to get an abortion, so she runs away from home, and ends up with the Sunshine Family, a seemingly happy, Christian family, who has taken in a number of children with the type of birth defects that the girl’s mother described could happen. They seem happy, and nice, but are they really. The girl is played by 8 different actors throughout the movie, including one boy, and two adult women, to go along with 5 different teenage girls or different shapes, sizes and ethnicities.

The girl is obviously completely naïve about sex from the beginning. When she lets a trucker have anal sex with her, she is shocked to discover that you cannot get pregnant that way. She does get pregnant by seducing a family friend of about her own age. For her, she wants a child so that way, she will always have someone to love, and someone who loves her, which seems vitally important after her cousin, Dawn Wiener (from Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse has died).

Palindromes set up a series of moral tests that are probably impossible to pass. In one segment, we are sure of who is right and who is wrong – who is good and who is bad – only to have our opinions completely reversed in the following segment. It is comforting to audiences to see their values reflected on screen, and Solondz specializes in a cinema of discomfort. No matter what you believe, you are sure to have those beliefs challenged and you are sure to be offended.

Has Solondz every really presented a positive character in his films? Surely Aviva, the pregnant girl in Palindromes isn’t really evil, but she isn’t really good either. She’s a confused child, who everyone simply uses as a pawn in their game. But for the most part, Solondz gives us characters who we initially feel sorry for, only to later discover that they are rotten to the core, just like the rest of them. The only two characters who, I think, remains truly sympathetic throughout an entire film is Jane Adams’ in Happiness – a woman who is constantly trying to open herself up to different people and relationships, only to discover that people are consistently rotten underneath. The other is Dawn Weiner in his debut, Welcome to the Dollhouse, who is like a teenage version of the Jane Adams character. Everyone else in his movies are too corrupted to be nice.

And yet, we feel sorry for these characters. In Happiness, Philip Seymour Hoffman may have violent sexual fantasies, gets drunk and makes obscene phone calls, but he does it because he’s lonely, and wants to make a human connection, but does not know how to react around people. Dylan Baker may be a pedophile, but he is also a loving father, who respects his son enough to tell him the truth. Solondz sees his characters with his eyes wide open – both the good and the bad in them.

I am realizing now that for a piece about God and the Cinema, there has been little talk of God in this piece so far. That’s because I think Solondz’s films take place in world without a God. His characters are so desperately alone and miserable, and they are put through so much pain and torment, how can they possibly believe that there is some sort of benevolent God watching over them. They can’t. The cinema of Todd Solondz shows us a world where people are cruel, mean, ugly and alone. You want to label him a misanthrope go ahead, but people like this exist out there in the world. And they are people – not monsters. If there is a God in the world of Todd Solondz, he has long ago given up trying to help his characters. They’re on their own.