MovieChat Forums > Wiener-Dog (2016) Discussion > Saw it.... (Spoilers)

Saw it.... (Spoilers)

posted 8 years ago by thehumaneardrum
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I'm a huge Todd Solondz fan. Loved Welcome To The Dollhouse, Palindromes, and Storytelling the most. I went into this with pretty high expectations and walked out with a mixed bag. It's not bad - don't get me wrong - but it's uneven and you have to chew on it for awhile.

The good parts of the film are good. The lesser parts aren't so much bad as just not in tune with the rest of the film's tone. The first story is Solondz at his best. The second drags a bit but the acting is phenomenal. It also contains one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in a Solondz film where Brandon tells his brother about the dead of their father. The third story was a disappointment. I love Danny DeVito and was ready to see Solondz rip apart liberal, hipster academia, but the story was just really one-note and depressing. It didn't quite go anywhere and the punch-line at the end didn't really work. The fourth story is the best. Not much to say about it other than that it encapsulates the themes of the movie perfectly and has the best acting and writing.

My biggest peeves are the intermission and the ending. I thought the intermission was cute and everything but it was just so out-of-place and hard to digest. It was the kind of thing that worked better on paper than in application. The ending is also so outrageous and bizarre that it's hard to accept. I can accept that Wiener Dog is turned into an animatronic art project, but it just has no relation to anything else that happens in the film. There's no catharsis or reason for it happening and it just leaves you feeling, "Um, okay..." I think it would have been a better ending if the dog was just run over and that was that.

Overall, I want to give it an eight but I'd realistically go with a seven-and-a-half. Worth a watch but not as good as his others.

[–] talkinhorse 8 years ago

This is all open to subjective personal interpretation. I'm a fan of Solondz and this film hit me as it was meant to and I applaud it -- I'm sorry; it just doesn't seem right to say I "liked" it; Solondz is beyond a simple like or dislike. But I have a different take from yours.

First, there was a progression in the segments: Childhood, early life, later life, and finally the threshold of death. Each segment dealt with another age-appropriate horror. In the black comedy of Solondz, this is humor: Whatever your situation, something terrible and inevitable is coming at you. In a weird sort of way, I nevertheless found this film abstractly optimistic, in that life went on in spite of the parade of horrors. The child had his moment of euphoria, and for this he paid a terrible price -- but at least he got that moment, and that can never be taken from him. And, in spite of perceptions, wiener-dog survived to be matched with Dawn, and her adventures, too, had an element of ironic optimism. And then poor disrespected Schmerz, with his hopeless aspirations of selling a screenplay and the mockery he faces for his attempts to stimulate young fools...Yes, Schmerz finally found a practical and effective use of his lesson plan, and so he finally got his revenge on the world. I had to laugh at that; the sort of overwhelming laughter that isn't LOL but more like OMG. And finally, yes, a contemplation of approaching death. It was dramatically appropriate that someone should die at that point; since it wasn't Nana of course it was wiener-dog herself. And that horrid animation was the final punch line; a terrifying suggestion that even death is not the end of our Earthly humiliation. So, all things considered, I came away with a sense of perfect dramatic balance, and all dreadful brilliance that no one can do quite like Todd Solondz.

[–] thehumaneardrum 8 years ago

And that horrid animation was the final punch line; a terrifying suggestion that even death is not the end of our Earthly humiliation

That's an interpretation I didn't think of. A lot of my confusion with the film just came from being perplexed with the ending. It wasn't out of revulsion by any means - which is what you get from a lot of Solondz dissenters - but more because I just didn't see how it fit into the larger scope of the film. If Wiener-Dog was crushed by the car and it cut to black, that would have been effective as an ending for me because it would have cemented the themes of mortality and life's fragility.

I think with the whole art exhibition thing, I just didn't know what to make of it. I'm not a super-analytical person who needs everything tied up with a bow, but it was difficult to decide where I stood at the end. Is that a good thing? Who knows? But I like your interpretation in that humiliation continues even after death.