Happiness director Todd Solondz returns with his unique brand of bone-dry humour for this portmanteau of four loosely connected stories involving the eponymous dachshund. Dropped off a kennel, the dog is christened Wiener-Dog by her new owners Tracy Letts, Julie Delpy and their young son, Keaton Nigel Cooke. However, a mistake involving a granola bar leads to a terrible bout of diarrhoea and Wiener-Dog is taken to be put down. Vet Greta Gerwig takes pity on her and brings her home, where she embarks on a road trip with school friend Kieran Culkin. Later, it's Danny DeVito's turn, a sad sack film lecturer desperate to hear back about his screenplay, before moving into the care of the terminally-ill Ellen Burstyn.
Solondz's strength is also his undoing here as his aptitude for character insight makes Wiener-Dog an occasionally frustrating affair: just as we're getting into the backstory and life of a character, the story up sticks and moves on to the next vignette. DeVito's life leading up to his breakdown would be a film in itself, and what is going to happen to Gerwig and Culkin once they hit the road is disappointingly left unexplored. Hopefully Solondz will return to these tantalising characters in future films.
Full to the brink of typical Solondz losers, it’s the Gerwig-Culkin story that stands out. Initially about the lonely Gerwig attracted to the bored Culkin despite him bullying her friend at school, her story then develops into Culkin's: in what is a seamless handover it emerges that Culkin is a drug addict hitting the road to deliver some bad news to his Down's syndrome brother. Like DeVito's story, this could be another movie in its own right. Some episodes slide into each other with ease while others are linked less well (just how did DeVito come into possession of the dog? Does it matter?)
All the while we're treated to typical Solondz weirdness. The multiple girls who appear to Burstyn, telling her they represent different aspects of her life (the life she would have had if she forgave her mother, the life she would have had if she had 'bigger tits', etc). And only Solondz would offer up a slow tracking shot of a trail of dog diarrhoea to Clair De Lune.
Funny and terribly sad at the same time, Wiener-Dog may not rub shoulders with Happiness but will more than satisfy Solondz fans.