Life's a bitch

[April 25th, 2007] Mike White's directorial debut, Year of the Dog, is smart, ruthless and precisely observed. It is also, perhaps not coincidentally, mostly boring and unpleasant. It concerns a woman who gives up on life while she ostensibly celebrates it, and shows exactly why she would cash in her chips. That it will probably put its audiences in the mood for a refund is merely a corollary achievement.

The heroine, a shaky creature named Peggy, is played by Molly Shannon, the Saturday Night Live alum whose humor has always edged close to hysteria. Here it drops over the edge. By day, Peggy is a slightly bewildered secretary for some sort of corporate health mill, where she brings in morning doughnuts and listens rigidly to office gossip. Her nightlife is far more fulfilling: She goes home to Pencil, a beagle who is far more soulful—and dear to Peggy—than any of her fellow cubicle dwellers.

Then Pencil dies. This is a loss that Peggy can hardly afford—and while it looks for a moment that she will find significant consolation in Newt, a vegan animal-rights worker played by Peter Sarsgaard, she instead winds up at the far fringes of his movement, without his companionship. (He's gay, and "pretty much celibate anyway, so it doesn't matter.") It's not a far leap for Peggy to the lunatic fringe, and adopting every canine in the local pound. "People have always disappointed me," she explains. "The only ones who've been there for me are my pets." So down with people, up with dogs. Up on the furniture, even.

I can already hear you PETA members uncapping your pens. Put them down. There is nothing crazy about loving animals, or embracing a vegan diet. (There is something a little crazy about taking your 5-year-old niece on a field trip to a poultry processing plant, as Peggy does, but let's consent that this is a matter of degree.) And dedicating yourself to dogs doesn't require rejecting people. But this is not a movie about everybody, or even a movie about dogs; this is a movie about Peggy. And Peggy very clearly quits on humanity. She has a fine model in celibate Newt. "Last night," he muses, in a brilliant monologue by Sarsgaard, "I had a nightmare that I was attacked and raped by two bull mastiffs. But what am I going to do, stop caring?"

But, of course, Newt has stopped caring, at least about anything beside those bull mastiffs. And Peggy follows him. White unsentimentally charts this resignation. But it's a fine line between unsentimental and cynical, and White crosses it often in Year of the Dog. Since making his screenwriting splash with 2000's Chuck & Buck, White has had a taste for miserable neurotics; here it swallows the entire screen. The world he summons is filled with flat compositions and even flatter characters. It gives Peggy nothing. It doesn't offer much to an audience, either, except some bitter laughs and a brutal reminder that in everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love. Puppy love is no replacement.