Wiener-Dog 2016

* Written in August 2016

Brutal, honest, uncompromising filmmaking 

This is the movie of 2016. Its a movie about where we are as a world in 2016. The way Love was the movie of 2015, Boyhood 2014 and 12 Years A Slave 2013.

Its another dark satire from Todd Solondz whose work grows more poetic and reflective with each film. He's worked with episodic films before but this time they are tied together narratively by a small symbolic animal actor and thematically by the the progressing ages of the human actors. Its biographical and confessional.

One one level this is Solondz' most appealing work, at least visually and marketing-wise. But it could be his most savage and aggressive. But its also his most balanced and most clever. Very possibly his best.

He solidified this style of muted Technicolor nightmare storytelling with his last films (Life During Wartime and Dark Horse) which were very under-the-radar. "Wiener" is his most visible film since Welcome to the Dollhouse and he uses that as a tool to shock the Dollhouse fans and Dachshund fans who wander into this existential horror film.

There are no gimmicks or tricks. Images, dialogue, acting and directing make the movie and nothing hold back. Solondz has evolved into one of the greatest film directors ever delivering nothing but personal works that entertain and also leave one rocked to the core. With age he has stripped down his directing style to Pure Cinema with powerful moving images that are poems unto themselves and dialogue that is never superfluous. The average film-goer may object to his upsetting themes of despair, pedophilia and loss of innocence, but there's no debating that this man is an artist of the highest order.

Unlike most online reviewers, I was satisfied that Solondz hadn't finally given in to making a cute indie festival crowd-pleaser. And thankfully he had a crew of producers and actors who supported him in tricking the mass media into thinking this was something other than a bold statement. Tod Solondz is the only artist on the list of modern American filmmakers who is unpopular enough and full of enough conviction to call out the villains of this modern era: celebrity artists, SJWs, Millennial hipsters, corporate sponsors, bad parents and all the enemies of honesty in our society and the killers of great cinema.

The film is being sold as the first Solondz film since his debut to avoid explicit perversion or mention of pedophilia. Actually, Dark Horse was that film. Wiener Dog makes allusions to these taboo subjects subtly and the effect is even more upsetting and tragic. There's a very pornographic scene of a male child actor symbolically asking to be raped followed by an agonizing extended moment where Todd Solondz own personal Hell is literally unraveled on screen. This all-encompassing depression for his condition and the shameful guilt in his un-indulged fantasies symbolically explode on the screen (anyone who has seen "Happiness" will pick up on the powerful meaning of bloody feces in the Solondz oeuvre).

Wiener Dog is an act of a creature ripping off the created human husk and bearing the blackness and pure light of his soul on the screen for the cold judgment and dim-witted entertainment of us all. The final shot is one of the most powerful metaphors ever created through cinema. Total catharsis and self-reflection for the repressed and utterly dark mind with a heart of gold.

10/10