Year of the Dog

Molly Shannon starts this movie as an incredibly likable, lovable person. She's a people-pleaser, a pencil-pusher's assistant buying donuts out of her own pocket for the office staff. As a sister and aunt, she's generous and thoughtful even in the face of her brother's and sister-in-law's overprotective, neurotic behavior towards their children. She's alone and without real love and of course, she's a dog lover. Her dog really is very sweet.

What she clearly wants more than anything is a real relationship with a real person. Her brother has a life and family of his own and her best friend at work is occupied with keeping her soon-to-be-fiance in line. Incidentally, her brother's wife, played by Laura Dern, is great, constantly talking out of the side of her mouth, quietly, so as not to be understood by children, even when none are present. She and her husband play a great modern couple, preoccupied with being modern parents with typical modern needs.

This film is full of people I would normally look down on: a boss whose life seems to be composed of nothing more than his conviction of his own self-worth and consequent undervaluation by his managers, a best friend completely clueless about real love and relationships who is making the most obvious mistakes and the happy couple who seems oblivious to anything but the lice in their daughter's hair and the red stains - surely put there by the Benadryl with which their nanny is doping their infant son - on their nanny's shirt.

I love the first 20 minutes of this movie. Molly Shannon plays a character unlike any she's played before, with no quirks, no twitchy movements of the body or mouth, no wild enunciation or nervousness. But she quickly goes down a path of blind fanaticism and activism brought on by a truly traumatic event. At first, I found myself trying to identify with her need to plunge into something bigger than herself, to wallow in her grief and feelings of helplessness. After a while, though, it became more and more apparent that her new-found passion for activism wasn't filling the need she had in the first place.

I don't know that we're supposed to feel happy for Shannon in the end, pursuing the cause she has embraced, but I definitely don't. She has become yet another person on whom it's easy to look down, for becoming single-minded in her approach to life, in abandoning truly meaningful avenues of expression for superficial activism that seems for a while to fill a void. Instead, I became happy for the other people in her life who, though from the outside they appear to be shallow and full of meaningless stock phrases and attitudes with which to confront life, have true depth of feeling behind their facades.

Everyone has to find some way to deal with their lives, and if you work at a boring office job, you learn to put on the happy-office-person face and pretend to be upset by office politics and made wildly happy by small percentage raises. If you're a parent living in a suburb, you put on the face that signals ultimate concern over the mental health of your child and general interest in the lives of the normal people around you. But that doesn't mean you give up actual feeling underneath it all, and that you can't show real care and emotion when it matters most.

I don't recommend Year of the Dog because it starts feeling a little unbelievable after a while, but Molly Shannon really puts in a great performance and gives a glimpse into the heart of someone who feels unable to take hold of her life and make it what she wants it to be.