year of the dog

year of the dog is the directorial debut of mike white (writer of the good girl, chuck&buck) and stars molly shannon as peggy, a woman whose closest companion, her dog pencil, dies and subsequently, her life as she knew it falls apart. peggy is a secretary whose only friends are her coworker layla (regina king) and her brother and his wife (thomas mccarthy and laura dern) but we see that these relationships are more or less superficial and that peggy truly feels closest to pencil. when peggy adopts a new dog, she meets newt (peter sarsgaard) who feels the same as her about animal rights and she begins to like him and it seems as though they may have a relationship. however, he like peggy, has better relationships with animals than humans and is incapable of being anything more than a friend to her. after this realization, peggy adopts a strictly vegan lifestyle which alienates her from her friends and family. molly shannon effectively portrays the balancing act that peggy attempts to perform between living a normal life and adhering to her beliefs. in the scenes when we see her using her company’s money to support animal rights foundations, and when she takes her brother’s children to a farm and then a slaughterhouse, we know she is attempting to do good things, but they end up backfiring because her gestures are too extreme. shannon conveys this through her performance by shifting between humour and drama, even within particular shots. it is often difficult to know whether we’re supposed to be laughing or feeling deeply sympathetic towards peggy. i think this technique is effective especially when peggy ultimately abandons the traditional life she had been living to support her cause entirely at the end of the film. even after she has been rehabilitated and her boss has welcomed her back, she cannot rejoin the life she lived before. i saw this film soon after zoo (a film dealing with real-life zoophiles) and it got me thinking about the spectrums of animal love. year of the dog seemed to me to be the safe side of the spectrum, portraying a woman with a deep emotional connection to her pet, so intense that when he dies, it upsets her entire world, and zoo being the dangerous territory of beastiality. i do not think the relationship portrayed in year of the dog is meant to suggest that peggy is a zoophile; just to perhaps bring to light the idea that the connections some people feel to animals are often more fulfilling than their human interactions. and that the way the men in zoo had to negotiate their regular lives with their love of animals was similar to the way in which peggy negotiates her animal rights beliefs with her existence in a more traditional setting.

watch the trailer