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By Peter T. Chattaway
MIKE WHITE has a somewhat unusual pedigree for a
filmmaker.
His father Mel was a prolific evangelical writer and
communications expert – among other things, he ghost-wrote one of
Jerry Falwell’s autobiographies – before coming out of the
closet in the early 1990s and becoming a gay-rights activist.
Mike evidently inherited some of his father’s
creativity; after working on TV shows like Dawson’s
Creek and Freaks and
Geeks, he turned to writing and starring in
feature films, such as Chuck & Buck, The School of Rock and Nacho Libre.
It is tempting to think White is still working through
some of the issues that he and his family have had to deal with. In The Good Girl, for example, he
played a dorky Christian who tries to get Jennifer Aniston to go to his
Bible study.
And while his latest quirky, unsettling film, Year of the Dog, doesn’t
have any explicit religious content, it is still possible to detect echoes
of White’s conflicted past.
The film stars Molly Shannon as Peggy Spade, a
secretary devoted to her dog, Pencil. But one day Pencil dies, and Peggy is
stricken with grief. Her friends and relatives shower her with superficial
advice – get drunk, have sex, take pills – but nothing
they say can fill the dog-shaped hole in Peggy’s heart.
Peggy does toy with the idea of seeking fulfillment in
romantic relationships, but the two men she meets – next-door
neighbour Al (John C. Reilly) and rescue shelter volunteer Newt (Peter
Sarsgaard) – disappoint her in different ways.
But thanks to her friendship with Newt, Peggy becomes a
vegan, and gets a new sense of purpose from the fact that she now has a
label for herself. “It’s nice to have a word that can describe
you – I’ve never had that before,” she says.
As Peggy becomes obsessed with animal rights, however,
her behaviour turns increasingly zealous, irrational, even downright
criminal. While babysitting her brother’s children, Peggy seizes the
opportunity to indoctrinate them by taking them to an animal-rescue farm.
And then there are those cheques she forges.
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| Molly Shannon as dog-lover Peggy Spade in Year of the Dog |
Year of the Dog is
partly about the way people in need of an identity can allow themselves to
be so consumed by causes and agendas that they fail to be truly human; as
my colleague Jenn Wright has put it, Peggy’s problem is that she
“doesn’t know how to be passionate without becoming
one-dimensional.”
But the film also asks whether passion, even
misdirected passion, might be better than going through the motions, as
many of the other characters seem to do.
It could be especially fascinating to see how different
audience members respond to the film’s final moments. Does Peggy
finally find a healthy form of fulfillment in the end? Or, as another
colleague of mine argued, is she still essentially lacking something, and
allowing a political cause to take the place of true personhood?
And how would we interpret those final moments, and the
story leading up to them, if Peggy’s passion were not animal rights,
but, say, spreading the gospel?
• • •
The Nativity Story wasn’t
as big a hit at the box office as some people hoped; but it should find a
decent audience in living rooms, now that it’s out on DVD.
The disc includes both full-screen and widescreen
versions of the film, but has virtually nothing in the way of bonus
features. To help make up for that, I teamed up with a priest to record an
audio commentary for the film. You can download it through my blog and
listen to it on an MP3 player while watching the DVD.
And speaking of movies about the early days of the
incarnation, Good News Holdings – the media company created by
evangelical pollster George Barna – recently announced that it would
begin shooting its adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt in
October, in Israel. No actors or directors are attached to the project yet,
but the company has begun looking for a boy to play Jesus.
On the Good News website, Barna says his company is in
the business of making “Spiritainment.” Their first movie, Dudleytown, is a “Christian
teen horror film” they plan to release in October; the movie’s
official website, believe it or not, is
GoodAndBloody.com. Only time will tell if movies
like these will be any better than such recent secular
‘Godsploitation’ flicks as The
Reaping.
–
filmchatblog.blogspot.com
May 2007
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