A Dog Named Suck
Mike White’s Year of the Dog is Oldboy for the PETA set

By Tiffany Rainey

When the strongest scene in a film is Molly Shannon, so disheveled and lonesome you can smell the shit wafting from her dog-lover attire, shoveling tens of cans of pet chow into a shopping cart, you either have one helluva pathos epic or something akin to a unanimous yawn. Adjust your head one degree north.

The directorial debut of Mike White, a harmless screenwriter (The Good Girl, School of Rock) and sometime actor, seems to have many a critic writing glowing, pre-view reviews like small checks to PETA. Dog comes up short in the department of dark-lite humor that once blessed Jennifer Aniston with her only semi-tolerable role in The Good Girl, and completely lacks a comedic albeit puzzling force like Jack Black.

In the beginning the audience at the advance screening, myself included, played along. Shannon, here as an office drone named Peggy who lives only for her petite beagle Pencil, earned a few laughs from the darkness. The lack of emotion resonating from a face associated with melodramatic skit-sketches like Superstar’s Mary Katherine Gallagher is instantly processed as deadpan and it works. Thirty minutes, a dead dog and a few pitiful crying jags later, Shannon’s blank stare and robotic lines are no longer sardonic and, it’s painfully clear, aren’t supposed to be. This is her premature comedian-out-on-a-dramatic-limb role, the kind that Will Ferrell pulled off with surprising class in Stranger than Fiction but has perpetually snared Jim Carrey in a pathetic can’t-win situation for nearly a decade. In the theatre, random chuckles were replaced with exclamations of pity and it was hard to tell or care whether they were aimed at Shannon’s lukewarm attempts at sincerity or the parade of pre-slaughtered creatures her character is bent on mothering.

The premise and cast are actually not too shabby. You can see why this destined bomb made it into production and even managed to attract respectable faces along the way: Girl loves dog. Dog dies. Girl replaces dog with potential boyfriends. All potentials flake. Girl finds new dog. New Dog fucking sucks and girl becomes obsessed with saving all animals large and small. Girl flips but lives happily ever after.

White’s gift at sarcastic, socially-aimed one-liners and a character-intensive plot schematic transform the storyline into something original and tragically believable, one of those WTF-slash-relief headlines smothered in with “Suicide bombing kills 40” on the AP. His direction, however, tips that vital creative balance where a director sees when a screenwriter is plunging too deep into the waters of self-serving political diatribe. With a few candid script doctors, White might have dodged the heavy-handed animal rights propaganda and made a melancholic indie ode to quirkiness with appeal for anyone not sneaking a miniature into the movie inside an oversized handbag.

The redeeming weight of the film lies in White’s signature overdevelopment of his supporting roles. John C. Reilly, cast as Peggy’s hunting-enthusiast neighbor, serves as a comedic pinch hitter, while Laura Dern, a fur-loving sister-in-law overprotective of her little ones, and Peter Sarsgaard, the asexual animal-lover thwarting Peggy’s affection, round out and serve exactly what Shannon is fundamentally incapable of delivering as a lead – some smart laughs.

Long discourse short, all the close-knit fans of Shannon and White best avoid the lifetime burn of seeing their heroes zapped powerless. Those who could care less about the credits shouldn't even bother with Netflix. But if you need an arty shove in the direction of full-scale picketing for the furry ones, this is more engaging than YouTubing Nora the (truly talent-free) piano-playing cat. You’ll be stalking Anna Wintour’s mink coats and loosening pasture fencing in no time. It’s your Oldboy.

This discourse of Year of the Dog is written by Tiffany Rainey for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.