An electrifying Caleb Landry Jones plays the damaged heart of this oddly wonderful tale of resilience and revenge.
Drag queens, disability and dozens of canines converge in Luc Besson’s “DogMan,” which opens with a quotation from a 19th-century French poet and closes with a symbolic crucifixion. In between is the strangest, possibly silliest movie of the veteran director’s idiosyncratic career. It is also borderline brilliant.
On a wet night in New Jersey, a bloodied man dressed as Marilyn Monroe (Caleb Landry Jones) is arrested while driving a truck filled with agitated dogs. An empathetic prison psychologist, Evelyn (Jojo T. Gibbs), learns that the man is named Douglas, the dogs are his “babies,” and that his horrifying story resonates more than Evelyn would like with a predicament of her own. Flashbacks to Douglas’s past expose a childhood terrorized by a Bible-thumping brother and brutal father, who caged the boy alongside a team of fighting dogs. He also delivered the gunshot wound that would consign Douglas to a wheelchair for most of his life.
That life, unfolding in scenes that run the gamut from sweet to bizarre to heartbreaking, is a dark fairy tale of survival. Hunkered in a dank, abandoned building filled with books, security cameras and four-legged companions, the adult Douglas maintains an almost psychic bond with the only creatures to ever show him sustained affection. From his booby-trapped lair, he provides vigilante services to local supplicants, operating as a kind of godfather (dogfather?) with a pack that obeys his often wordless commands. Gigantic or tiny, fearsome or cuddly, stealing from the rich or subduing gangsters, they scamper through the film with lolling-tongued delight and discernible personalities. Not since “Amores Perros” (2000) and “White God” (2015) have so many movie canines impacted the lives of so many characters.
Besson, to his credit, recognizes the wackiness in his screenplay, and plays into it without reducing Douglas’s pain to a joke. Even so, it’s doubtful if the movie would work without Jones’s astonishing commitment to, and understanding of the character. (If you saw him two years ago in Justin Kurzel’s “Nitram,” you already know he excels at playing deeply damaged individuals.) He’s mesmerizing here, skirting easy pathos to give Douglas a touching dignity that stabilizes the movie’s kooky premise. When he discovers a talent for cabaret and debuts a performance of Édith Piaf’s “La Foule,” the moment is both sad and sublime: a bona fide showstopper.
People get hurt in this movie, but “DogMan,” loping along like one of its pups, doesn’t linger over the violence. Scenes flow smoothly from chilling to cute, buoyed by a cheekily over-the-top soundtrack. This isn’t a maudlin, triumph-over-adversity yarn: Douglas might be in a wheelchair, but he’s easily the most able body onscreen.
DogMan
Rated R for a brutalized child and a chomped crotch. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
