DogMan

Director: Luc Besson (France). Year of Release: 2023

Newark, New Jersey. There’s a long queue of vehicles due to a police road block which is stopping every driver. Next up has longish blonde hair. It becomes clear that it’s a man in a wig. He’s wearing white stage make up which is partially smeared in blood. The police ask to look in the back of his van. When they open the door, they see various breeds of dog. The man reassures them: “they won’t hurt you as long as you don’t hurt me.”

The other side of town. A woman hands her baby over to her mother, as she’s been called into work. Evelyn is a prison psychiatrist who’s been assigned to a new patient. It is, of course, the man in the wig. Now that he’s out of the van, we also see that he’s in a wheelchair. He introduces himself as Doug (“but no-one calls be that any more”). The film will proceed with Doug telling Evelyn about his miserable life so far.

There was a trend in the 1990s for books with titles like “A Child Called ‘It’”. They competed with each other for which could tell the most depressing apparently true childhood story. It’s hard to not think about these books as Doug tells his story. Raised by a vicious father and a bible bashing older brother, Doug was forced to live in the pen of dogs which dad raised for fights. Then dad shot off Doug’s finger, and the ricocheting bullet got trapped in his spine.

The good news out of this is that it provided Doug with an opportunity to escape. He put his finger in a bag and gave it to a dog to take to the police. The cops came and rescued Doug … before putting him into a series of dreary institutions with kids for whom he felt less empathy than he did for his dogs. The feeling was probably mutual. Unable to walk far, in case he moved the bullet lodged in his back, Doug just sulked in his wheelchair.

Trying to seek some joy within this misery fest, Evelyn asks Doug if he ever had a relationship. Once, sort of. He developed a crush on Salma, a young female drama teacher, then followed her career as she became a successful actor. Years later, he summoned up the courage to visit her backstage. He was delighted to hear that she remembers him. Right up to the point when she introduced him to her husband and told him that she’s pregnant.

Doug gets a biology degree and a job in a dog pound, where else? When Council cuts close the pound, Doug finds an abandoned civic building and moves in with his canine family. He teaches them tricks – like sneaking into rich people’s houses and stealing their jewellery. On more than one occasion, Doug tells Evelyn that he’s all about wealth distribution. He also helps out his old, poor neighbours by setting his dogs on the local gangster.

I think it’s fair to say that DogMan is not based on a true story. And we haven’t even mentioned Doug’s side job as a singer in a local drag club (which confused one user reviewer on IMDB who irately complained: “the protagonist performs in a drag show as Edith Piaf: he opens his mouth and her voice comes out. No one seems to notice the fraud though, the audience in the club is in awe.” Well, yes, that’s how drag shows work).

Doug’s act only contains one song – he doesn’t have the energy to do any more. Once a week, he rises from his wheelchair and performs standing up before collapsing behind the stage curtain when it’s over. His speciality is old time divas like Edith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich. We witness the run up to the opening scene and see that the blonde wig is part of his Marilyn Monroe act.

You can’t say that this is a plot we’ve seen a thousand times before, but is it any good? Well, Caleb Landry Jones is spectacular as Doug. Then again, he has to be, as pretty much all the other parts are hideously underwritten. We’re asked to assume that Doug opens up to Evelyn because he understands her pain, but apart from the fact that she’s Black and her deadbeat ex-husband still keeps hassling her, we learn very little about her life or what this Pain consists of.

And then there is some risible dialogue. In a Lassie moment, where one of Doug’s dogs asks a cop to follow it, someone really does say: “I think he’s trying to tell us something”. And then there’s the moment where a dodgy insurance guy tracks Doug down to the club and asks if he’s on every night. “No, just once a week”, says Doug. “Which night is that?”, asks the guy. Well, today is Friday and you just saw him perform. I hope you’re better at insurance than you are at simple deduction.

Other aspects of the film do work better, in particular the ones where you don’t have to think too much. But DogMan feels imbued with a social Darwinist determinism which makes it point out in intricate detail the exact steps you need to follow to end up as a misanthropic dog collector and occasional drag artist. Nothing happens by accident. No-one takes any decision about what they do with their lives. Things just happen because they seem to have been predestined.

Very early in the film Douglas is asked to explain his cynophilia. He explains: “Dogs have only one fault. They trust man.” This inevitably results in a pretty misanthropic film (strangely enough, after Catch the Killer, the second celluloid misanthropy I’ve seen this week). I don’t mind that. People are over-rated, But it does leave the film with a certain cold lovelessness. It’s pretty enough to watch, but not really a film that engages you. Ok, but not all that.