... And Then You Die

WIENER-DOG (B+) - Todd Solondz has never cared about happy endings. Life is crap and then you die.

The dour director has lately been rediscovering his voice from the '90s, that period when he reeled off "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Happiness." He drifted in the next decade, but he has recovered of late with "Life During Wartime" and "Dark Horse." With "Wiener-Dog" he literally calls back to his early masterpiece, "Dollhouse," bringing back an adult Dawn Wiener as one of a series of owners of a hapless dog who can't seem to find a good home.

The vignettes don't hold together very well (though they each share a similarly flat affect), but each one is quietly effective, powered by strong performances. In the first sequence, Julie Delpy is Dina, a jaded mother who has no filter when talking to her child, especially about the horrors of life, including the cruel fate some dogs face, including the marquee mutt, who spends almost all of his time confined to a cage in the basement. Her son, Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke), home alone, frees the pup and feeds breakfast bars to the poor thing, which proceeds to strafe the house and yard with explosive diarrhea. Solondz, wrings a few laughs and head-scratches by choreographing vast quantities of puddles of dog excrement to "Clare de Lune."

The parents take the dog to the vet and plan to have it put to sleep. But it's rescued by Dawn Wiener -- played with loose-limbed jerkiness and nerd glasses by the fine physical actress Greta Gerwig. Dawn runs into an old high school mate, Brandon (a charming Kieran Culkin) at a convenience score, and he revives her old nickname: Wiener-Dog. Against everyone's better judgment she desperately tags along with this junkie on a visit to his brother and sister-in-law in the suburbs. The couple have Down syndrome and are portrayed as clear-eyed innocents. The dog is bequeathed to them and their spacious yard.

The third segment is anchored by sad-sack film professor Dave Schmerz, played with elegant melancholy by Danny DeVito. Dave once had a screenplay produced, but he's been waiting years for lightning to strike again, struggling to get phone calls to his agent returned. Stoop-shouldered Schmerz is treated like a pathetic anachronism; he is mocked by snotty millennials for his old-fashioned screenwriting shorthand technique of "What-if/Then-what." Schmerz seeks revenge by using Wiener-Dog in a provocative and disturbing manner to exact revenge.

Cut to the haunting final act in which a acerbic old woman (Ellen Burstyn), living in her museum-like apartment with a caretaker and Wiener-Dog. She is visited by her hipster granddaughter, Zoe (an artful Zosia Mamet from HBO's "Girls"), and her flamboyant artist boyfriend, Fantasy (Michael Shaw), who is working on a maudlin new project. The young woman is ostensibly visiting to catch up with her beloved Nana after a long estrangement. But it's just a matter of time before Zoe hits the old lady up for a cash infusion. After they leave, we see the old woman on a park bench, in a dizzying reverie, interacting with herself as a child. She loses track of Wiener-Dog, and you might want to avert your gaze at that point. Solondz is nothing if not a shock-meister who likes a twist ending.

But the filmmaker is also morbidly funny. (Enjoy the halftime interstitial set to the jaunty original tune "Ballad of a Wiener-Dog.") And while his vision is dark, he ferrets out quiet moments of humanity in the far reaches of the abyss. When a couple holds hands, it is moving and powerful. And the actors are game: Delpy plays against type as the mean mom; Gerwig disappears into her lonely loser aching for a connection; DeVito holds his resentment in his jowls and his dead eyes; Mamet and Burstyn crackle during their generational clash.

This is Solondz's most satisfying storytelling since his breakthrough study of childhood bullying, back when he was picking on a different Wiener-Dog.