TODD SOLONDZ is notorious for mercilessly toying with his characters like some kind of sadistic puppeteerâthe dude wrote Welcome to the Dollhouse, okay? In the filmmakerâs latest, Wiener-Dog, an adult female dachshund is his primary victim.
Obviously the wiener dog dies, and obviously Solondz doesnât grant her a peaceful passing. But the protagonist wienerâwho, at different points, goes by the names âWiener Dog,â âDoody,â and, uh, âCancerââis primarily a vehicle for Solondz to move through four vignettes of his charactersâ fucked-up existences. His tableaus of human vice are bitingly funny, especially as an unforgiving roast of pet owners with savior complexes. But he misses the mark a few times with oddly forced jabs that seem to flirt with backward racist, sexist humor. Itâs unbecoming, especially for a director who seems so acutely aware of humanityâs grossest failings. Wiener-Dog features a cameo from Welcome to the Dollhouseâs Dawn Wiener (Greta Gerwig), whoâs now grown-up and working as a veterinary assistant. Sheâs one of many owners of the titular dog, which quietly bears witness to peopleâs daily misfortunes (and suffers at those peopleâs hands).
In the first vignette, the wiener dogâs upper-middle-class suburbanite owners repeatedly emphasize to their sickly son how reliant the animal is on humans for survival. But at every turn, Wiener-Dog proves that the canineâs life persists in spite of human intervention. Itâs a predictably grim snapshot of human nature from Solondz, but one that celebrates the docile innocence of the wiener dog. This is particularly salient when the camera follows, for what feels like hours, a trail of bloodied dachshund diarrhea to Claude Debussyâs "Clair de Lune."
During each scene you wonder, is this when Solondz is going to kill our sweet wiener dog? Itâs exhausting, but these moments of uncertainty drive the film, each one a possible breaking point between the wiener dogâs life and death. A death that, Solondz constantly reminds us, is hugely inconsequential.