From TV’s late, lamented Freaks and Geeks to the Jennifer Aniston indie vehicle The Good Girl, screenwriter-producer Mike White has established himself as a champion of the overlooked, disregarded, willfully oppressed and just plain weird. Brilliantly straddling the line between squirm-inducing comedy and tender drama, his projects plumb the emotional depths of characters most of us would barely notice, let alone deign to have a conversation with.
Year of the Dog, his directorial debut, is the apotheosis of this approach—an affecting, sublimely astute portrait of grief and burgeoning social engagement told from the vantage point of a crazy dog lady. It’s also one of the best American films of the year so far.
Saturday Night Live alum Molly Shannon plays Peggy, a shy Southern California office flunky whose sole satisfying relationship is with her beloved beagle, Pencil. When the pooch dies suddenly after raiding the garage of a hunting-obsessed neighbor (John C. Reilly), Peggy is forced to stare into the void around which she’s carefully but unfulfillingly shaped her life. Things go both uphill and downhill from there: She develops a crush on a timid, pansexual pet advocate (Peter Sarsgaard, boldly playing against type), who influences her to go vegan; surreptitiously donates funds from the account of her ineffectually ambitious boss (Josh Pais) to various animal-rights organizations; and inadvertently traumatizes her niece with a proposed visit to a chicken processing plant. Peggy’s spiral culminates—astonishingly enough for an ostensible comic romp—in a growing sense of her own humanity that’s played without a hint of mawkishness or condescension.
Despite being crack for both dog lovers and people who enjoy a good cinema-induced crying jag (my girlfriend logged three), Year of the Dog is clearly no melodramatic paean to puppy love. It isn’t particularly hilarious, either. White finds sly, understated humor in the extremes to which his characters will go in order to wrestle value from their existence, but never resorts to the cruel laughs or judgmental snideness that hobble so many movie satires these days. Only Peggy’s gratingly bourgie brother and sister-in-law (Thomas McCarthy and Laura Dern) are played for outright yuks, and even they’re relatively well-rounded.
Much of the credit for this goes to White’s remarkably self-effacing cast, especially Shannon. Her Peggy is simultaneously pathetic, chipper and scarily unhinged, and Shannon taps into her own quirky awkwardness with gutsy verve. Her raw, meticulous performance is enhanced by the film’s pointedly economical mise-en-scene: Cinematographer Tim Orr and production designer Daniel Bradford render the movie’s familiar suburban milieu with fresh detail and a thoughtfulness that mirror White’s regard for the characters. The result is tight but never contrived—there’s not a single extraneous scene or wasted emotion here.
That such workmanship and understated profundity are expended on a black comedy about canophilia makes Year of the Dog that much more pleasurable, but I suspect the subject matter will keep some people away. Pity. A steady diet of undercooked Hollywood slop like Babel and Crash has left moviegoers with the impression that human truths—like the fact that love, whether it’s for animals, career prestige or deer hunting, is inevitably loony from the outside looking in—are best smothered in highfalutin trappings. This deceptively simple film delivers the goods with barely a voice raised.