The great critic Robert Warshaw once pegged the gangster movie as “the no to the great American yes that is stamped so large over our official culture.”
Todd Solondz doesn’t make gangster films, but I can’t think of a better way to describe his corrosive domestic comedies — you absolutely should see Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, Storytelling or Palindromes, but not if you need cheering up about the order of things. Solondz’s territory is the suburb, all tricked out in Have-A-Nice-Day primary colors, but that’s about it for American optimism. From then on it’s no, no, no all the way for the benighted inhabitants of a crippled American Dream.
Solondz doesn’t work in the realist mode — the star of his new movie is a traveling dachshund, cute as a button — but Wiener-Dog cuts alarmingly close to the, uh, bone of our collective past, present and possible future.
We meet the titular dachshund circling a narrow cage at the pound, looking for comfort. She’s not alone: passed carelessly from hand to hand, the repeatedly renamed pooch serves as the connective tissue between a succession of suburbanites staggering through dark days.
Solondz has often used similar scenarios to take apart media-fed pieties about sexual abuse, pornography, abortion, the Holocaust. But Wiener-Dog’s foster parents seem lost and lonely, stuck in the mud of a disconnected anomie. Adopted into the clinically elegant home of a stressed couple (Julie Delpy and Tracy Letts), the dog soon wreaks graphically poopy havoc with their plans to console their small son (Keaton Nigel Cooke), a recent cancer survivor. Which may or may not be why the summarily dumped pooch is renamed Doody by a vet’s assistant named Dawn Wiener. Solondz loves to shift shapes: Memorably played by a teenaged Heather Matarazzo in Welcome to the Dollhouse, Dawn is now realized by Greta Gerwig, a golden beauty hidden behind horrid glasses and dispiriting, unflattering threads.