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.

Pain at home; culture shock abroad

TODD SOLONDZ: MORE PAIN AND SORROW

Tim (Dylan Riley Snyder) and mom (Allison Janney).
Director Todd Solondz shook up the indie world with 1995's Welcome to the Dollhouse. In one way or another, Solondz has been making similar movies ever since. It's possible to regard Solondz as a true American miserablist, and his movies -- though tempered with dark humor -- inflict all manner of pain on their middle-class characters. Solondz's latest -- Life During Wartime -- catches up with characters from 1998's Happiness, which (among other things) took aim at the darkest underside of suburban living. In the new movie, the characters from Happiness are transported into the present, although they're not played by actors from the first installment. Ciaran Hinds, for example, replaces Dylan Baker, as a pedophile father. Hinds' Bill is being released from prison during the movie's grim opening sequence. Life During Wartime, a middling helping of Solondz, alternates uneasy humor and unrelieved helpings of anguish. This time, though, the tug of yearning (notably for absent fathers) doesn't feel especially strong. I'm not sure Life During Wartime takes us any place that Solondz hasn't been before; it seems more variation on a theme than fresh discovery. I look for a quick exit from art-house venues across the nation.
LOOKING FOR LOVE IN CAIRO

Alexander Siddig and Patricia Clarkson tour Cairo.
No one is likely to accuse Cairo Time of being misnamed. Throughout this slow-moving look at the experiences of a married woman (Patricia Clarkson) waiting for her U.N.-employed husband in Cairo, writer/director Ruba Nadda allows the city to seep into our senses in ways that sometimes make us feel as if time has stopped. Nadda effectively depicts the ways in which Clarkson's Juliette makes the transition from culture shock to immersion in the city's rhythms. Beautifully photographed by cinematographer Luc Montpellier, Cairo becomes a full-fledged character in the movie. Sad to say, the city proves more interesting than any of the movie's human occupants. Clarkson does the most she can with a character who spends s lot of time alone. Given little to play off, she's left to plumb the depths of her reactions to a series of low-key events, the most notable involving a tentative and largely inconclusive relationship with the owner of an Egyptian coffee shop (Alexander Siddig). Nadda's screenplay tends toward repetition, but the movie sometimes catches us in its sway, much the way an unexpected breeze can dispel the torments of stifling heat -- if only briefly. As one who's not likely to travel to Cairo any time soon, I welcomed this cinematic journey, even as I yearned for some dramatic sparks to fly.