Year of the Dog Review

Best in show

Quirky and off-center, Year of the Dog is the little indie that could

by Bob Green / 05-16-2007

Be warned: If you’re after a reassuring, largely formulaic romantic comedy peopled with the beautiful, Year of the Dog isn’t it. The first movie directed by eccentric screenwriter Mike White (The Good Girl, Chuck and Buck), this little movie is far more ambitious than, say, the newest Drew Barrymore assembly-line confection. It approaches reality a little closer than is comfortable for some romantic moviegoers, and its characters are less than gorgeous, asymmetrical in every possible way and prone to fits of contradiction.

These people are, in general, their own worst enemies in ways you might recognize.

With a strong cast featuring the always reliable Peter Sarsgaard, Laura Dern and John C. Reilly, the story—what happens to a mousy secretary after her beloved beagle dies—stars former SNL comedienne Molly Shannon, who burrows right in and makes the character-driven movie work. That is, she’s not after the Miss Congeniality award, nor feel-goodism of ordinary romantic comedies. Her character, Peggy Spade, is a composite of tics, internal personal conflicts and ambivalence as lifestyle. Spade’s only friend, and a good one, was Pencil the dog. When she discovers his collapsed body one day, her world goes into a tailspin.

Now more alienated than ever, Peggy finds herself alone in a world in which her relatives talk either of snagging a marriage partner…or how their kids are doing, and they’re beginning to regard Peggy as a liability. (She’s a failure, they suggest, because she’s not married.)

Enter two men: a doltish next-door neighbor (Reilly, really good at being obnoxious) and an animal rescue volunteer (Sarsgaard, as meaningfully off-center as usual). Wisely, Peggy gravitates toward Newt, the Sarsgaard character but, even there, problems arise.

Here the movie imitates life: The path Peggy “chooses” is part savvy, part accidental, part beyond anyone’s control.

In The Good Girl, writer White’s main character was sabotaged by the casting of Jennifer Aniston, too attractive for the part. Now that he directs this one, he’s made sure that Shannon isn’t just another Hollywood Jewish-American princess with an adorable nose job. In some scenes, Shannon is ungainly and plain Jane-ish; in others, she is attractive and winning—as is the movie.

In a summer of super-charged, hyper-speed movies, Year of the Dog might seem a bit leisurely paced, a series of vignettes seemingly going nowhere. But Shannon’s Peggy Spade is not a superhero(ine) and White’s movie is not aimed at overaged adolescents who are a lot more like Peggy emotionally than they care to recognize.

Forget the hype: Year of the Dog is a good movie. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.