There's a detached quality to Dawn (she sits on her bed, staring out the window, saying to herself simply: "I miss nothing here.") A person with no attachments, she floats, and Greta Gerwig is a great "floater." Dawn is like Remi in that she sees the pain in others (in the bitter Mariachi band they pick up along the way, in the troubled Brandon). Brandon is on his way somewhere, and she decides to come along with her dog, and suddenly "Wiener-Dog" becomes a road movie. Dawn is cheery, pliable, caring, and susceptible. When he tells her that she looks like her dog, her face lights up. At a convenience store, she runs into Brandon, the boy she knew when she was a kid (played by Brendan Sexton in "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and here played by Kieran Culkin), and they have a stilted reunion where it's clear that he can't wait to get away from her. Dawn rescues the dog who is about to be put to sleep from a vet's office, cradling it in her arms. The next owner is Dawn Wiener (all grown up from "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and now played by Greta Gerwig). Remi's love of his dog, and the rapturous scene where the two tear apart the living room in slo-mo, is an ecstatic moment of uncomplicated joy and freedom, the best that dogs (and children) can exemplify. She relates the sad story of Croissant, her childhood dog who got pregnant (only she describes it as Croissant having been "raped by a dog named Mohammad"). "Nature doesn't care about animals," she informs Remi. "We don't believe in God," she tells her son. Delpy handles her son's anxieties in a mildly panicked and yet totally inappropriate way. When the dog gets spayed, Remi is concerned that she will be scared and in pain when the dog gets sick, Remi asks questions about death. But Remi falls in love with the dog, naming it "Wiener-Dog" (the nickname of poor Dawn Wiener in Solondz's "Welcome to the Dollhouse"). (Dad is shown trying to train the dog, throwing vicious epithets its way). Neither parent is happy with this situation. Remi ( Keaton Nigel Cooke), a little boy with constantly bickering parents ( Tracy Letts and Julie Delpy) is given the dog to comfort him after a serious illness. It starts in an ultra-cool modern house with no personal objects in sight, not even in the child's room. Shot by Edward Lachman, two-time Oscar nominee (for "Far From Heaven" and " Carol"), "Wiener-Dog" enters and exits multiple worlds, following the dog's destiny. The owners flail in the void, searching for a handhold, something to make life meaningful. Each owner of the dog is further along down life's path, and the dog is the witness to the passage of time. Just a moment ago, the dog knew where it was, who its "person" was. Disorientation is almost total for the dog. It is surreal and elegant, putting us into the world-view of the creature we will follow. Early on, there is a slow horizontal pan down a line of caged dogs, lit in the sickly-green of buzzing fluorescence.
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