“Mind you, in reincarnation, you may not come back as a human. You could come back as a dog, and, I will say in parenthesis, that makes a great deal of sense to me, because so many dogs, I find, are closer to the human than human.”
--Norman Mailer, On God
For all that’s been said about the loyalty and love of dogs, almost no one talks of them as nature’s true egalitarians. Spend any time in a dog park and you’ll see dogs that are no more than specks winding up the biggest mutts to get them to play, and the big guys happily responding. In his last months, when he was deaf and blind, my no-longer-wagging-with-us Maltese E.J. would run up and down the hallway of our apartment building floor accompanied by Teenie, the Pomeranian who lives across the way. And as he began to slow down, she, knowing something was wrong, matched her speed to his so she could keep watch over him, prevent him from running into walls and such.
The band of stray pooches that figure in Luc Besson’s glorious Dogman work as equals on whatever enterprise they’re involved in, whether it’s bringing their master (Caleb Landry Jones) exactly whathe needs to make a cake, one ingredient at a time, or fetching baubles and wallets from the homes he sends them to rob under cover of darkness. The relationship between Landry Jones’ Douglas and his doggie charges is descended from Fagin and his urchin pickpockets, only with mutual love instead of mutual usury at its base. When you see the mutts slink into a cold modernist home while the occupants sleep and remove the valuables, all to the tune of Miles Davis’ hipster apogee “So What,” you’re watching a particularly sleek and ticklish piece of choreography, the wit of the conception working against the chilliness of the nighttime ice-blue lighting and the hard angles of the architecture.
It's tough to say just what Dogman is—crime thriller; the story of how an outsider makes a place for himself in the world while remaining an outsider; a showcase for the kind of drag numbers that start in fandom and wind up allowing the performer to release something of himself in the course of the performance. Part of what makes the movie so crazed and wonderful—and I suspect what is giving even the few critics who’ve liked it a hard time—is that the movie has nothing to do with adhering to a brand or ladling out what the audience expects.
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