Amid the hellfire of a year that was 2016 (which now looks like a comparative walk in the park), Todd Solondz released his seventh feature film, Wiener-Dog, a follow-up to his 1995 breakthrough, Welcome to the Dollhouse. Like Solondz’s earlier effort, Life During Wartime, the film casts new actors (Greta Gerwig and Kieran Culkin) as previously established characters: namely, Dawn Wiener and Brandon McCarthy, who were previously played by Heather Matarazzo and Brendan Sexton III. The film is what used to be known as a “portmanteau” film; four self-contained but connected vignettes featuring different characters. What links them is the titular dog, who wanders between the disparate characters, “adopting” them as her new owners.
Reexamining the film now involves less consideration of “cultural standards of the time” than does contemporary viewership of previous films in Solondz’s oeuvre, as it is relatively recent. For example, whilst it may predate the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency by several months, there are allusions to the then-growing identity politics movement, whose dominance of American left-wing discourse in the mid-2010s was (many would say unfairly) cited as a factor in Trump’s victory.
The opening segment tells the story of Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke), an elementary school-aged boy desperate for a dog who is given Wiener-Dog as a present by his mean, self-centered, upper-middle-class father, Danny (Tracy Letts), much to the chagrin of his mother, Dina (Julie Delpy). Danny and Dina seem like descendants of Marty and Fern Livingston (John Goodman and Julie Hagerty) in Solondz’s earlier Storytelling in terms of their lack of genuine love for their offspring and interest in giving them a materially happy upbringing primarily in terms of how this benefits their own status. Indeed, when Remi releases Wiener-Dog into the wild, it’s as though he’s realized she’s going to be subjected to the same stifling, bourgeois indoctrination process that he has been, and he wants her to get out while she still can. After all these years, then, we can see that Solondz has lost none of his talent for firing broadsides at upper-middle-class US society, albeit in a slightly less vituperative manner than was the case when he was in his thirties and forties.
Wiener-Dog then stumbles into the care of Dawn, who is now in her early thirties and working as a veterinary nurse. With no one in her part of New Jersey available to take the dog, Dawn temporarily adopts her. By coincidence, they bump into Brandon at the local 7-Eleven, who asks them if they would like to drive to Ohio with him. It is perhaps a mark of how little Dawn has going on in her life that she agrees to go on a cross-country road trip with someone she hasn’t seen for 20 years. They eventually arrive at the house of Brandon’s brother, Tommy (Connor Long), and sister-in-law, April (Bridget Brown), both of whom have Down syndrome. We see from his kind-hearted interactions with his brother that Brandon has a sweeter side to his nature than was in evidence in Welcome to the Dollhouse, wherein he largely behaved like the misogynistic, homophobic, ableist bully he was throughout.
Wiener-Dog then moves rapidly across the country in a comedic interlude sequence to find herself adopted by Dave Schmerz (Danny DeVito), a failing screenwriter who is working as a university professor in New York City to pay the bills. The character is world-weary, disillusioned and out of step with the ideals of the social justice-oriented Zennials he teaches. Much like Paul Giamatti’s Toby Oxman in Storytelling, it’s difficult not to jump to the conclusion that Schmerz is being used as a fictional surrogate for Solondz here, as (nominative similarities aside) the director actually teaches writing and directing at New York University in real life. Indeed, Solondz has gone on record as saying that while he loves his students, he regards NYU as an “evil empire.”
However, unlike Oxman, who was in his thirties and still just about young enough to espouse an optimistic view of his station in life, Schmerz is deeply pessimistic and miserable about the ignominy of his career. While Schmerz finds many aspects of pet ownership irritating, Wiener-Dog manages to alleviate some of his loneliness. Following complaints from staff and students about his misery, he attaches a bomb to her and releases her onto the campus. The bombing attempt fails and his segment of the film concludes with Schmerz confessing his crime to the police. There are obvious parallels here with El Salvadorean housekeeper Consuelo’s (Lupe Ontiveros) murder of the Livingstons in a fatal gas leak at the end of Storytelling. However, unlike the successful act of violence committed by Consuelo, who is outwardly even more professionally unsuccessful than he is, Schmerz’s depressed, late-middle-aged attempt at retributive violence is as much of a failure as his screenwriting career is.
Following a professor’s failed attempt to use her as a weapon of mid-level destruction, Wiener-Dog migrates south to be adopted by Nana (Ellen Burstyn), an elderly, immobile shut-in who is visited by her granddaughter, Zoe (Zosia Mamet), and Zoe’s artist boyfriend, Fantasy (Michael Shaw). After some stilted, awkward exchanges between the three, during which we learn that Zoe is not really interested in Nana on a human level and is only visiting her to obtain money to fund Fantasy’s art projects, Wiener-Dog is run over and killed and ends up being stuffed and turned into an art exhibit by Fantasy some months later. As was the case with Tommy and April having Down’s Syndrome in the earlier segment, one can’t help but feel as though Fantasy’s being a muscular Black man is being milked by Solondz for cheap laughs here in the way it is counterposed to his wearing of a pink T-shirt, taking a tiny, weedy-looking dog for a walk and describing himself as being “like Picasso” (the assumption being that anyone this “tough and urban” in appearance likening themselves to Picasso will elicit much merriment from the audience). While it’s true that Solondz is now directing films about far less controversial subject matter than something like Happiness, the sort of humor that could be construed as dog-whistle ableism and racism in Wiener-Dog remains just as troubling as anything in that film.
We can see, then, that across seven films (his forgotten 1989 debut Fear, Anxiety & Depression notwithstanding), Todd Solondz has to some extent shed the “enfant terrible” status he acquired in the early stages of his career. As controversial as Happiness was in 1998, it would possibly be even more difficult film to make now. In more recent films like Dark Horse and Wiener-Dog, Solondz may have dealt with less overtly contentious subject matter than he did then, but these latter works have retained the deeply cynical view of human nature and contemporary American society that was on display in Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness. Indeed, as we have seen, Wiener-Dog still contains troubling elements. Solondz may not be the most morally centered or politically correct writer-director working today, but he nevertheless remains a very interesting one. Hopefully, his next film, Love Child, will be just as provocative as his previous work, while jettisoning their more problematic aspects.
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