Year of the Dog is another one of those films attempting to get under the skin of the notion that comedy and one's potential to fall into madness, at least cinematically, are closer than you initially think. As a matter of opinion, comedy and madness, or the idea that a character can loose control of their surroundings after having existed within the realms they occupied for so long, can indeed go hand in hand; they can play out in a balanced fashion, particularly when there's something especially biting or satirical about it, resulting in pieces from recent years along the lines of Verbinski's The Weather Man or Harron's American Psycho. Take this, and sprinkle in a little bit of sub-text to do with contemporary suburban America and the oddballs one would seemingly encounter within such an environment, and you have what people like to describe as an "off beat" film trying to cover some serious ground, albeit getting tangled up somewhat in the process.
Year of the Dog's lead is Molly Shannon's Peggy, a middle aged American woman living alone in a nice American neighbourhood, on a nice estate, in a decent house and with her pride and joy in the form of her pet dog she names Pencil. To say she loves Pencil understates things somewhat; she all of adorns him, lavishing attention on the thing no end – even allowing it to sleep with her on her bed come the nighttime which, to some, would be the beginnings of madness before all the strife has really begun. The pair of them are so attuned to one another, and she to the species in general, that during walks in the park, Peggy cannot help but stare lovingly at all the other pooches owned by all the other people doing as she does now, while Pencil is even granted some brief screen time of his own when he agonisingly watches her back out of the driveway to get to work thus, he is tragically left all be himself. Peggy's life is what it is: single, but more than happy with her pet. Where her boss has his work and Peggy's brother Pier (McCarthy), plus his wife Bret (Dern), have their very young children, Peggy has her dog.
Her boss is Robin (Pais), a largely inanimate gentleman with a reservedly cold tone. He outlines certain harsh realities in his office that morning at work, the background of his composition busy with a motorway in the distance plus traffic charging in either direction; hers, in comparison, is the rest of the office: a stilted and quieter set of items on show highlighting respective positions in life as specific facts broadly linked to ability and qualifications are mercilessly outlined. Her work colleague is the busier Layla (King), an African-American woman with a penchant for films; a cheating partner and some pretty lousy advice for our heroine when things get tougher later on. Those things arrive when poor Pencil dies, a mysterious death at a relatively young age when he is heard yelping and yapping one summer's morning out in a neighbour's back garden. It is Al's (Reilly) garden in which Pencil is found, dialogue with the man revealing he too lost a dog when he was very young and helped combat it by maintaining an interest in hunting. Briefly, the film' hypothesis rears up and it is no mystery as to why the scenes with Al work as well as they do, with this idea of grief, and ways in which to deal with grief, simmering beneath a surface while never fully blooming out into a constructed whole.
What follows is a film essentially showing to us why it is that, at least socially, our Peggy could never quite hit it off with humans and found such solace with animals. She comes to occupy lonely places peppered with bright hues of colour; breaks at work scored with music you'd more than likely hear rolling out over a baby's crib as a parent attempts to get them to fall asleep, very much instilling a certain child-like sensibility about her. We observe Peggy effectively begin her life anew, the death of Pencil the upsetting of the established norm and systematically launching her out onto a slide downwards in psychological well-being when she is forced from beginning again at the bottom in acquiring a new dog and rebuilding. Trips to family members Bret and Pier feel unnecessary; the mutual affiliation she has with Newt (Sarsgaard), a pound working animal specialist, are tied up in there somewhere while a sub-plot to do with co-worker Layla's man having an affair known only to Peggy is dropped in for good measure.
On the overly positive side, Shannon does well to carry the film; doing so with that look about her face, that expression which constantly suggests a deeper, more unremitting sense of tragedy and pain beneath an exterior which you could be told is one of a joyous person, and yet still be moved to ask questions. She has something going about her alluding to stark emotion just waiting to explode out of her that has, so far, been repressed. Things connect and link up with one another uneasily in Year of the Dog, and the electricity is only sporadic in its arriving to the forefront; the idea of the grief and confusion born out of the death of a pet not working quite so well as other ideas did in the aforementioned examples, but making for a film straddling a line between blackly comedic urban drama and a flat-out tragedy asking us to just break down at get seriously upset. Over it looms the ghost of Jeunet's 2001 film Amélie, and while at times its politically imbued content gets the better of it, often forcing it to come across as a Vegan convert video or a self-aware animal rights promotional film, it holds up its end neatly enough.
