Year of the Dog

Review By: Benjamin Lee
BenjaminLee@TheCinemaSource.com

Living in New York City, I’ve learned of a deeper bond between man and dog than I had previously encountered. New York is a city full of people who are living to work more than working to live. Therefore this ruthless ambition means that other parts of their lives are downgraded and given less attention.

The time and effort one would require to raise a family are wrapped up in developing and furthering a career. So people will often supplement whatever maternal or paternal instincts they harbor by purchasing and caring for a dog. Their life with their dog will frequently resemble that of a parent with a child. They’ll take them to the park and watch them play with the others, they’ll find themselves heartbroken at the very thought of leaving them alone all day and most disturbingly they’ll take pride in dressing them up in the nicest clothes they can spend their salary on.

In Year of the Dog we witness this very relationship taking place between Peggy (Molly Shannon) and her beloved dog Pencil. Pencil is a reliable companion who won’t upset or leave her and they share a comfortable life together which makes her days as an assistant in a dull office much easier to bear. One day though everything changes when Pencil unexpectedly dies.

Life without Pencil is tough and lonely and Peggy fails to find the sympathy she feels she deserves from those around her. Her boss (Josh Pais) is obsessed with office politics, her friend (Regina King) is obsessed with her boyfriend while her brother (Thomas McCarthy) and his wife (Laura Dern) are obsessed with their children. Without Pencil, Peggy is forced to face the world and find a new way to make her feel contented and complete.

Along the way she encounters her knife-obsessed neighbor (John C Reilly) plus the dog-obsessed Newt (Peter Sarsgaard) who teaches her more about animal rights and brings up the unthinkable…..replacing Pencil.

What Year of the Dog manages to do, and this is its greatest achievement, is to take a character who would have usually been ridiculed and laughed at in a mainstream comedy and give her an unprecedented level of attention and respect. Peggy is not a character for us to pity or criticize but she’s a fully-formed person who writer/director Mike White never patronizes.

The trailer may have misled us into believing we had a quirky romantic comedy on our hands but rather the film takes some unexpected turns along the way. Firstly it’s a lot darker than we may have assumed. Peggy’s downfall, although always kept comedic thanks to Shannon, goes deeper than you would expect. The romance itself also barely registers and the film transforms into a character study of what happens to a person who’s not really sure what her life is about.

Just because the film revolves around Peggy that doesn’t ...