A dachshund and people in pain

Todd Solondz's Wiener-Dog contains few surprises for the director's fans.

I've never been particularly enamored of director Todd Solondz's vision of a suburban America dominated by cruelty, isolation and sometimes criminality. And with Solondz's Wiener-Dog, a movie named for the main character of his 1995 breakthrough, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Solondz's worldview seems no more appealing.

Wiener-Dog isn't one evolving movie, but four vignettes united by the presence of a dachshund in each one of its unhappy tales, as well as by a pervasive sadness that runs against the tide of Solondz's attempts at satirical humor.

One of the characters in Wiener-Dog is a failed screenwriter named Schmerz, a not-so-subtle reference to the Yiddish and German words for pain. Deeply felt emotional pain provides the fuel that keeps Wiener-Dog's engine sputtering.

In the first episode, an insensitive father (Tracy Letts) brings Wiener-Dog home for his son, a kid who has battled cancer. The boy's mother (Julie Delpy) doesn't want a dog in the house, but acquiesces when the father insists.

The emotion of the piece centers on the boy (Keaton Nigel Cooke), a cute kid whose every line of dialogue sounds like the plaintive cry of an innocent who's about to be trampled. The boy, I suppose, embodies the movie's suffering soul.

Despite his generous gesture toward the boy, the father is brusk and insensitive; the episode ends cruelly when Wiener-Dog is taken to a veterinarian to be euthanized.

Here is Solondz in brief: The insensitivity of parents toward both boy and animal stands as a form of contemptible self-absorption.

In the next episode, the character played by Heather Matarazzo in Solondz's first movie, re-emerges as an adult, this time played by Greta Gerwig.

Gerwig's character winds up taking a trip with a former high school classmate played by Kieran Culkin, a drug-dealing young man who visits his brother, who has Down Syndrome and is married to a woman with Down Syndrome. This time, Wiener-Dog's name has been changed to Doody.

The movie includes a faux intermission in which Solondz's grim misanthropy contrasts with an upbeat presentation reminiscent of the interludes once found in bygone drive-in theaters.

The intermission gives way to episode three, which revolves the aforementioned Schmerz (Danny DeVito), a sad sack of a man who's teaching screenwriting at a college and who is regarded as useless and unhelpful by most of his students. The hapless dachshund becomes part of Schmerz's desperate revenge plot.

By the last episode, the dog's name has changed to Cancer, a pretty good indication that things will continue to go badly. Ellen Burstyn plays Cancer's owner, a sour woman who's visited by her granddaughter (Zosia Mamet). The granddaughter wants money to help support her hostile artist boyfriend (Michael Shaw).

Animal lovers, especially dog lovers, will recoil at the way Solondz brings his not-so-shaggy dog story to its conclusion.

What troubles me about Wiener-Dog has less to with its cruelty -- perhaps not as extreme as what we saw in movies such as Happiness (1998) -- but with its pro forma rendering of Solondz's mostly cheerless reality.

Wiener-Dog leads Solondz into a creative cul-de-sac in which neither real drama nor comedy can flourish. It felt to me that in each of these stories, only one outcome was possible: More misery for both the dachshund and its temporary owners.

Jesse and Celine on the rocks?

Talk is the action in director Richard Linklater's gem-like Before Midnight.
Director Richard Linklater's Before Midnight is a welcome rarity, a movie that digs deeply into the core of a relationship that's been going on for almost 20 years. At a time when insipid rom-coms tend to dominate the nation's multiplexes, a smart relationship movie can seem like a cultural antidote: fragile, tentative and absolutely essential.

This third in a series of films about two lovers who first met in Vienna in 1995 (Before Sunrise) and who reunited in Paris in 2004 (Before Sunset) continues and perhaps even strengthens Linklater's talky, introspective inquiry into the nature of love between two people who can't always get out of their own heads.

As those familiar with the previous two movies know, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) have had their problems: However, travel deprivation isn't one of them. This time, Jesse and Celine, now married to each other, find themselves in beautiful Greece with their twin girls.

The movie begins with Jesse feeling blue and a bit guilty because his son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) is about to rejoin his mother in the U.S. Looming separation triggers one of Jesse's nagging issues: Although he and Celine have two beautiful daughters, Jesse hasn't been the father Hank, his offspring from a previous marriage, needs or deserves.

Jesse's talk about moving back to Chicago upsets Celine, who believes she's already sacrificed a lot for the sake of their relationship. A dedicated environmentalist, the French-born Celine just has landed a job that allows her to pursue her career in an ideal European setting. The last thing she wants is to uproot and move to the U.S.

Say this: Jesse and Celine know how to suffer in comfort. They're the guests of a novelist (played by the cinematographer Walter Lassally) who has invited Jesse and his brood to spend time at his very pleasant villa.

Linklater is one of the few directors working today who makes no bones about directing talk-heavy films. Conversations evolve during a meal that Jesse and Celine share with a group of friends. Jesse and Celine stake out more turf, as they stroll about town. A hotel room provides the setting for what begins as an opportunity for romantic renewal but quickly degenerates into a fight.

Jesse and Celine's marriage may be shaky, but Before Midnight isn't a hand-wringing, soul-rending look at a marriage in its death throes. As was the case in the previous two movies, there's an exploratory quality to the conversations between Jesse and Celine, although this time, there's also plenty of anger, particularly on Celine's part.

Meanwhile, Jesse -- who earns his living as a writer -- mulls ideas for a new novel and continues his on-going inner monologue, which occasionally presents itself in the form of conversation with others.

Hawke and Delpy give such impressively naturalistic performances that they leave us hoping that Linklater will check in with Jesse and Celine again -- even though he's running out of times of day to provide these movies with names.

And keep this in mind: Despite the loose and deceptively informal nature of Before Midnight, it takes focus and discipline to keep a movie such as this feeling relaxed, unstudied and real.

The visiting relatives are French

Julie Delpy's new comedy deals with culture clashes, but in a strained way.

In 2007, Julie Delpy starred in and directed 2 Days in Paris, a comedy about a couple that traveled to Paris hoping to salvage a foundering relationship. Delpy has now moved her act across the ocean for 2 Days in New York, a comedy about a Manhattan-based couple trying to survive a visit from her amazingly intrusive family -- and one of her old boyfriends.

Delpy plays Marion, a French photographer who's living in Manhattan with her boyfriend Mingus (Chris Rock). Mingus and Marion seem to be getting along well enough until her recently widowed father (Delpy's real-life dad Albert Delpy) shows up with Marion's sister (Alexia Landea) and the sister's boyfriend (Alex Nahon). As it happens, the boyfriend used to date Marion.

2 Days in New York serves as a kind of ragtag sequel to 2 Days In Paris: Both Delpys, as well as Landea and Nahon, appeared in the earlier movie, which provides a foundation for this one. But, no, it is not necessary to have seen the first movie to get something out the second.

Delpy evidently likes the kind of complications frequently found in contemporary life. Marion has a daughter (the child she had in 2 Days in Paris). For his part, Mingus has a son from a previous marriage.

This time, the comedy centers on what some of have called culture clashes, but which struck me as strained comic situations. Marion's father is supposed to be endearingly crude, but can seem more the latter (crude) than the former (endearing), and the whole business plays as if Delpy wanted to make a ribald sitcom with lots of loopy undertow.

To complicate matters, the French characters don't understand American blacks, and Mingus becomes increasingly frustrated with Marion's visiting relatives.

Delpy gives Marion a scattered quality that borders on frenzy, and Rock -- who's playing a talk show host -- does his best to make the transition from an annoyed but tolerant boyfriend to a guy whose patience is pushed to the limit.

In the movie's biggest piece of oddball casting, Vincent Gallo shows up as an art buyer who purchases one of Marion's works at an exhibition. She says she's auctioning off her soul to the highest bidder: Gallo's character is only too happy to play the devil.

How you react to 2 Days in New York probably depends on whether the movie inspires laughter or irritation. I leaned toward annoyance. Like Mingus, I found myself eager for these visiting French marauders to go home. Maybe the movie then could have taken a more convincing look at the relationship between Marion and Mingus.

Instead, Delpy turns her movie into a testing ground for a stream of situational humor and jumbled comedy -- only about a quarter of which struck me as amusing.