A State-of-the-World Movie

Todd Solondz’s Wiener-Dog is not only a state-of-the-art movie, it’s a state-of-the-world movie. This means that although the film cracks open hilarious, jaw-dropping perplexities in modern American life, it also recognizes everyday tragedies. The eponymous dachshund, who travels through people’s lives in four discrete, linear segments (Remi, Dawn, Schmerz, Nana), is more than a symbolic hapless figure but a living being in its own right and subject to the laws of the universe as much as any human character.

When a dad (Tracy Letts) gives the dog to his son, Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke), who is recuperating from cancer, the father explains: “You have to break [a dog’s] will so it’ll conform to your will, so it acts like a human.” The pragmatic advice shows a worldview that Solondz wittily and touchingly critiques. It is Remi’s response — “What is will?” — that reveals Solondz’s inquiry.

Of all the American Eccentric directors, Solondz is the most eccentric — and the most solid. In such films as Happiness, Storytelling, Palindromes, Life During Wartime, and Dark Horse, he has developed the least commercial and most unflinching perspective on contemporary life. He shows a sturdy perception of both the comic and the tragic, lately doing so without lapsing into the smugness, cruelty, or sentimentality that was so confounding in his debut film, Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995).

It is through Solondz’s interest in will that even his most off-putting characters win one’s compassionate regard. Remi’s stony father specifies: “Character, force of character, the thing that makes you you.” While the personalities in Solondz’s films can try anyone’s patience, they remain captivating despite behavior that is difficult to approve, much less meet with easy empathy. This oddity is embodied by Dawn Wiener, the schoolgirl protagonist of Welcome to the Dollhouse, who reappears in other Solondz films. Dawn (blandly portrayed here by indie darling Greta Gerwig) is the most challenging figure in modern American movies, precisely because she is such an unlikable sad sack. Her intractability tests our culture’s humane capacity. (Critics initially applauded Solondz for making Dawn a teenage doormat — Welcome to the Dollhouse was the favorite Solondz film of grade-school bullies who became wimpy, bullying film critics.)

In Wiener-Dog’s titular pun, Solondz dares to anthropomorphize Dawn Wiener’s unfathomable nature. He continues the transference of human frailty that was the central conceit of Palindromes, yet here uses remarkable emotional and aesthetic detachment — balancing the human and the animal so that troubling facts of existence (force-of-character details, the puzzle of human will) carry deep resonance.

On its non–Disney-family-movie level, Wiener-Dog is the most unsentimental pet film since the Roxy scenes of Godard’s Farewell to Language, which paid art-movie homage to Robert Bresson’s animal classic Au Hasard Balthazar, in which a blameless donkey was the soulful focus in a parade of wretched human activities. But it’s the American Eccentric level of self-conscious filmmaking and social commentary that makes Wiener-Dog, frankly, amazing. Solondz assesses the millennium’s moral calamity by revealing the moral failings that our aberrant media culture ignores.

Thus, I was the only one in the screening room to laugh during the Schmerz segment, in which Danny DeVito portrays a college film teacher trying to sell a screenplay to Hollywood. The dwarfish Professor Schmerz is denigrated by colleagues and ridiculed by students for his commitment to art (and his pedagogical challenge “What if? Then what?”). Like a Nathanael West figure, Schmerz embodies the sad folly of artistic ambition in a base culture — meaning Hollywood as well as today’s politically coddling academia. Solondz’s satire of clueless, narcissistic, cynical students is as brave as it is hilariously exact. From the unfeeling co-eds wearing “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts to a parody of The Hurt Locker and even Woody Allen, Schmerz represents Solondz’s own millennial bewilderment.

Wiener-Dog’s moral examination builds consistently toward a final sequence of personal irony. This last segment, about grandmother Nana (Ellen Burstyn) facing mortality while her granddaughter (Zosia Mamet) is caught in moral confusion, coheres the film’s motifs (including Schmerz’s unpopular subjects — “Real stuff: childhood, pain, memories, dreams”). Here, the Wiener-Dog appears as a pet named Cancer — a wild gag that connects Solondz’s vision to the compassion of William Inge’s lost-dog drama, Come Back, Little Sheba — recalling the humanism our vacuous film culture now disdains.

Nana’s bitterness against the world (she wears sunglasses indoors) is self-delusion, like Schmerz’s “What if? Then what?” Yet Solondz’s vision is clear: An immaculate, Godardian image catches the dyed-blonde granddaughter standing in emotional retreat next to one of Nana’s youthful self-portraits (a young girl in a yellow dress with her pet cat in shadow). How Solondz expands upon the scene’s ironies — and then expands further — amounts to the richest achievement in American movies this decade.

The Nana sequence resolves Solondz’s contemplation of spiritual denial and our culture’s self-betrayal. Old Nana echoes Schmerz’s desire for “real stuff: childhood, pain, memories, dreams.” Herself subject to modern unfeeling, Nana reflects little Remi’s query after his mother told him, “We don’t believe in God,” and then tried to explain about death. Remi’s response (like Nana’s) is haunting. 

Remi asks the nihilist’s question — articulating the anxiety that has dominated pop culture for the past few decades. The beauty of Wiener-Dog is that Solondz doesn’t accept millennial anxiety but questions it. He has gone from indie-movie, American Eccentric sarcasm to a cinematic mastery that recalls Carl Dreyer’s 1924 Michael — about an artist celebrated as “Maler der Schmerzen.” Wiener-Dog translates Solondz’s eccentricity; he, too, is a “painter of feeling.”

An audacious interlude bisecting the four tales resembles Tarantino’s juvenile, postmodern Grindhouse (where pop style eradicated conscience from contemporary film culture), but Solondz reproves it. Wiener-Dog rates comparison to Max Ophuls’s lyrical yet weighty masterpiece Le Plaisir. It should be impossible to watch Wiener-Dog and go back to Hollywood’s usual diet of dog food.

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Penny Lane’s eccentric non-fiction Our Nixon, The Abortion Diaries, and her new film Nuts! go at truth indirectly. She doesn’t “report” facts — as documentarians were formerly committed to doing — but shows the emotional life within facts. Lane seeks out the truth that should be at the core of biography but that most contemporary journalism now forsakes for “advocacy.”

Lane’s Our Nixon is this era’s most misunderstood documentary. Critics couldn’t accept the way Lane’s use of archival 8mm home movies by Richard Nixon’s closest associates, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin, unironically showed the president’s men to be relatable human beings. Lane accomplished the same feat with the women she interviewed in The Abortion Diaries, which fit a liberal niche but went unexpectedly deeper, eventually revealing social and moral quirks and individual will.

Now, in Nuts!, Lane gets even more eccentric, using archival footage plus lots of animation and vocal dramatizations to present the true-life case of John Romulus Brinkley. She examines the legend of the charismatic early-20th-century quack who, by claiming to cure male infertility through implanting goat testicles, became a millionaire and a grassroots politician.

Caught up in the fun of telling this tall tale, Lane never matches the fine, humbling truth of Our Nixon. Unlike Edmon Roch’s fantastic political history Garbo: The Spy, Lane’s wild narrative flirts with Michael Moore–style deceit and contempt. Yet Lane’s essential humanity comes through. Her sympathy for both the wonder and the tragedy of Brinkley’s story derives from a basically decent instinct that, among current non-fiction filmmakers, is eccentric indeed.