A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

I’ve been to the Europapark with my favourite daughter, and she had the good idea to go take the Valerian ride because she sort of liked Cara Delevigne in the Luc Besson movie. It’s with a virtual reality ride with a sturdy yellow helmet, but it is basically the Eurosat ride inside the silver globe, so that was a great ride for slightly nervous older geezers like me. It was also Luc Besson who co-wrote the series of Arthur and the Minimoys, and he was consulted for the park ride of the same name. It’s for the kids, but it was a pleasant change from the panic-inducing hellride called Blue Fire.

And so my girlfriend and me went to see Dogman, Besson’s latest feature film. (It has nothing much to do with the Italian movie of the same name except for some cast members of the canine kind.) For a number of scenes, it’s a formula movie, but a lot of the time, the movie captivates its audience because of Caleb Landry Jones’ performance. To be sure, he would not have been very high on my list to play Marilyn Monroe and Edith Piaf, but somehow he manages to pull off both roles, while remaining credible as his own character.

Douglas Munrow (yes, really) grows up in an unloving, violent family, somewhere in suburban New York, with only a kennel full of dogs as his friends. His father locks him up there until he can no longer walk and has to spend his life in a wheelchair. He is one of the friendliest but deadliest recluses in movie history, so much so that a chlichéd Latino gang wants him dead. That is where Besson sees fit to switch to Léon/Nikita mode and regales us with a shootout that would be by the book if it would not feature a number of four-pawed killers.

Douglas cannot move his limbs much, but his dogs do his bidding for him: they kill and break into houses, and the insurance agent who thinks himself very clever has to pay the price for that knowledge. Douglas will help you if you cannot help yourself, but do not get too close to him because he will defend his way of life because he has nothing to lose.

My main quibble with the movie, I guess, lies with the main character. If Douglas is such an empathic character, knowing first-hand about how it is to grow up and live in a marginalized existence with the daily threat of being wiped out financially and being bullied by neighborhood thugs, then why does he get down to their level and exterminate them tooth and nail? To be sure, Dogman is not a fine-tuned psychogramm of a lone, damaged character, but partly a revenge story, but the altruism, the drag show and the ultraviolence sort of stand at odd angles to each other, threatening to cancel each other out. On the other hand, this oddness is also where the movie gets its tension from: A guy being able to impersonate Edith Piaf cannot shoot the local drug lord dead, can he?