Vicious ‘Dogman’ shows a director known for excess at his most unmuzzled
Tim Grierson March 29, 2024
At their best, Luc Bessons films
occupy a different plain planeoperate in an unreality
. His action-thrillers The Professional and Lucy
maymight
be set in our world, but the veteran French director seem
sed
to place them in a parallel realm,
one powered by the loopy, escapist pleasures of movies themselves. Maybe thats why, when he has ventured into more overt fantasy terrain
,
like
in
The Fifth Element, it has never been a perfect fit. For Besson, the ordinary is suffused with sufficient strangeness.
But none of his previous efforts have exuded such a strong fairy
–
tale quality as Dogman, a strange, sincere paean to a brokenhearted outsider who
might may
also be a sociopath. Part musical, part character study
, and
part crime saga, this fatally uneven drama, about a damaged soul who
only
finds comfort
only
in his canine companions, brings together Bessons most extreme tendencies
,
without the inspired feverishness. If not for Caleb Landry Jones in the
lead title
role, it wouldnt work at all.
Jones, who won
Best Actor
an acting prize at Cannes in 2021 for portraying a burgeoning killer in Nitram, has made a habit of playing fragile men whose inevitable unraveling could lead to terrible violence. Hes ideally suited to the role of Douglas, who
,
as Dogman begins
,
has just been arrested
in drag
, decked out as Marilyn Monroe, complete with her pink, strapless gown and ravishing hairdo from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
The only thing
s
that mar
s
his beauty are the bandages and bruises on his face not to mention the unnerving smile he shoots Evelyn (Jojo T. Gibbs), the psychiatrist assigned to interview him in the middle of the night
at the police station
after
he Doug
was pulled over driving a truck containing dozens of abandoned dogs. Evelyn wants to understand how this
perpDouglas
, who uses a wheelchair, arrived at this moment in his life.
t T
hrough flashbacks, he will relate his tale of woe.
dogman-photo-shanna-besson-2023-lbp-europacorp-tf1-films-production-tous-droits-reserves-7y7a1648-rt.jpg
Ostensibly taking place in New Jersey, the film more accurately resides in a
cinematic
make-believe littered with random pop-culture references and reckless genre transitions. Besson
, who normally gravitates to action and sci-fi,
initially appears to be rooted in a grittier register. Lincoln Powell plays Doug
las
in the flashbacks, the most crucial being one in which, as a boy, he angers his volatile father (Clemens Schick), whose unorthodox approach to parenting
is to permanently involves
lock
ingDougla shis child
outdoors in a cage containing several dogs,
who animals who
become his
new found
family. After a grisly altercation with his old man, Doug
las
eventually breaks free but not before his dad leaves him short a finger and with a crippling spinal injury.
Dogman mostly sidesteps the limitations of a familiar narrative approach in which the static present-day story serves as a framework to go back into the characters past. It helps that Doug
las
s
misadventures, while only sporadically compelling, are suitably odd. Not only does
Douglas he
bond with dogs, apparently he is able to communicate with them, utilizing them as a shockingly (sometimes comically) efficient strike force. Then theres his unexpected stint as a performer at a drag show, delivering a knockout lip-sync rendition of
dith Piafs La Foule. Doug
las
will run afoul of gangsters
and mastermind with
high-stakes heists, but as is typical of Bessons solitary protagonists, all he really wants is someone to love.
The films
other
saving grace is Jones upsettingly gentle portrayal. Whether in
theDouglas
interview
s
scenes or in the flashbacks, his hushed intensity suggests a fractured man-child who was never properly socialized. (His
childhood trauma metaphorically strangles him, his
speaking voice barely
goes
above a whisper.)
I Even i
f weve come to expect Jones in wounded-animal mode,
it he
remains sickeningly alarming, especially because the actor never lets the audience
decide know definitively
if Doug
las
is a victim or a menace.
That tension proves more gripping than Dogman itself. One senses the empathy
the 65-year-old filmmaker Besson
feels toward Douglas, who
i
s as much of a stray as the homeless dogs he adopts. (Its hard to forget
, too,
that this is
Bessons the director’s
first movie since being
formally
cleared of 2018 rape charges. Intentionally or not, Dogman can be read as his defense of a misunderstood innocent
marginalized by a cruel society
.)
But
the cheeky outlandishness of
Besson
s
soon finds his way to
aprevious films only results here in
tonal incoherence
,
: a mishmash of somber character exploration and flagrant
genre
clichs. Those missing the shootouts of
his
and The Professional
will be happy to know they
re ve been
awkwardly shoehorned into Dogmans finale, forcing Jones to transform into a
n unlikelycut-rate
action hero.
Unfortunately,
Besson has rarely seemed so untethered
to from
anything resembling normal human behavior.
Some may relish Dogman for that very reason. Theres always been a playful irreverence to his films, an unabashed adoration for
grandiose
B-movie exuberance, his outlandish stories faint emotional underpinnings married to giddy spectacle. Jones
daring turn
, never winking at the rampant absurdity, gives the proceedings a little grounding. But Besson wants off the leash
, and
his instincts lead
ing
him astray.
