Back when I was 14, Todd Solondz unleashed Welcome to the Dollhouse upon an unsuspecting world. If I were writing internet reviews back then, I probably would have written, “OMG, I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS MOVIE EXISTS. THIS WAS MY LIFE!!! THIS WAS WHAT I JUST ESCAPED! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!” (complete with all caps, and probably flashing marquee text…after all, it was 1996). Instead, I’m going to quote the first paragraph of Roger Ebert’s 4-star review:
Welcome to the Dollhouse remembers with brutal and unforgiving accuracy the hell of junior high school. Many movies reconstruct those years as a sort of adolescent paradise; it’s a shock, watching this film, to remember how cruel kids can be to one another, and how deeply the wounds cut.
Brutal, unforgiving, shocking, cruel, deep, cutting…Solondz has returned time and again to pull from this well of darkness. But, it’s this deep paragraph that truly defines the Solondz viewpoint:
Scene after scene, Welcome to the Dollhouse piles on its details, re-creating the acute daily misery of being an unpopular adolescent and remembering, too, how resilient a girl like Dawn can be–how self-absorbed, how hopeful, how philosophical, how enduring.
Though Solondz never shies away from the cruelties of life, he never loses track of the human spirit. In Welcome to the Dollhouse, Solondz puts Dawn Wiener (cruelly nicknamed Wiener Dog) through a bombardment of cruelty from every aspect of her life. Dawn even gets to dish some out herself. But, Solondz never loses track of her humanity and compassion for others. Beyond that, even her adversaries are given empathetic backgrounds and realistic needs and desires. Solondz is not interested in cruelty for its own sake, but how our humanity inevitably leads us to acts of cruelty and how this cruelty shapes our personality.
20 years later, Solondz briefly returns to Dollhouse to create his most deceptively poignant film about life-defining moments of cruelty and the decisions that follow. Wiener-Dog is made up of four separate segments with four separate groups of characters at four different stages of life – Youth, Adult, Retirement, and Old Age – each tied together by the presence of a dachshund. Each segment provides a crisis moment in that person’s life where a key choice must be made that defines who you are.
The titular Wiener Dog gets her own pre-credits introductory sequence, where she’s unceremoniously ripped from her family, caged, and delivered to a pet store where she’s put in a display cage on a mesh floor that hurts her paws. At the store, people watch her and make decisions on her personality in a new scary environment that actively causes her pain. Despite the new and adverse environment, she is expected to be a happy winning puppy excited to be adopted. The scared doggy has to adapt and learn how to act like a cute puppy in order to survive. In each subsequent segment, the dachshund represents the choices leading to an unknown future. She’s less a character than a metaphor for the crisis moment, and, in each story, she’s given a different beginning and ending that informs the future of the character.
The dachshund is first given to a boy on the verge of adolescence. His wealthy parents are stifling and over-protective due to the boy’s health issues, yet have no aptitude with relating to their son. His mother (Julie Delpy) doesn’t believe the boy isn’t mature enough to handle a dog. His father wants to give him the responsibility as a teaching method. The dachshund and the boy are caught in the middle as the parents fight over their son’s future.
Dawn Weiner (Greta Gerwig) appears in the second segment, the only segment directly related to Welcome to the Dollhouse. On her way home from work, she happens upon Brandon (Kieran Culkin) in a store. Brandon, the bully from Welcome to the Dollhouse has had his edges sanded off, but he’s still that hot, dangerous, wrong-side-of-the-tracks, callous type that Dawn found so alluring back in middle school. Brandon has to go out of town, and invites Dawn to go with him, leaving Dawn with the choice of her current milquetoast life or the open unknown.
The least vital segment is the third, where an aging screenwriting teacher faces his obsolescence. Dave Schmerz (Danny DeVito) had one good hit back in the early 1980s, and a rocky road since. His philosophy of screenwriting is even weaker than Save the Cat, and he has been repeating the same slogan to his students for decades. Schmerz is faced with the humiliating realization that he is becoming outdated, and the choices that come with that.
The final segment is where Solondz shows his hand, Zoe, a frazzled young adult, is on a mission to spend time with her grumpy and jaded Nana (Ellen Burstyn), bringing her new boyfriend Fantasy in tow. But, Nana isn’t having any of it, providing only the most callous reactions and frequently using her live-in nurse as her personal shield. Then everything goes sideways…
For the first time since Storytelling (if not Happiness), Solondz is actively out to offend his audience into knee jerk responses. Though he packs Wiener-Dog with thinly-veiled racism, a rape anecdote, mass violence, sexism, viscera, and various other offensive acts, he wants to question how this everyday bombardment effects us. Every time he offends your sensibility, there’s always an underlying question that comes with that offense, and he’s finally inviting the audience into those questions. Despite the cavalcade of cruelty, Wiener-Dog might be Solondz’s most accessible film since Dollhouse, and his deepest film since Palindromes. Though frequently hilarious, with a deeply guilty sense of humor, each of those laughs come with a price. Though frequently empathetic, the empathy isn’t an endorsement.
Wiener-Dog isn’t a feel good film, but it is life affirming in its own way. Many people will find it not to their tastes, and that’s totally fair for a film this dark. In fact, Solondz might even agree with them. The denouement is its own tongue-in-cheek self-criticism on the quality of feel good art that stems from misery. So, cheer up. Everybody has a choice…of sorts.
