"Hangdog" is about a man who loses his girlfriend's dog while she's out of town on a job interview and spends the next few days in a panic trying to get him back. Set in the world of middle-class but struggling thirty-somethings in Portland, Maine, on the fringes of the tech and entertainment industries, it's a borderline cringe-comedy, the kind of movie where you sometimes want to look away from what its people are doing.
Its lead character — unemployed wannabe-artist Walt, played by Desmin Borges of TV's "You're the Worst" — impulsively makes decisions that are shortsighted or dumb and sometimes unforgivable, such as not calling Wendy when she's out of town to tell them that he lost her dog Tony and instead pretending he's still in his care even as he's stapling up "Lost Dog" flyers. Walt is so self-involved and riddled with neuroses and makes such consistently awful decisions that it takes a lot of convincing by the movie to make you believe that his devoted and totally together girlfriend Wendy (Kerry O'Sullivan) would be better off with him than without him. I don't think it quite succeeds in that aspect. But maybe I'm more cynical about these things than the people who made the movie: director Matt Cascella and his regular cowriter Jen Cordery, who, as it happens, are a couple who live in Portland, Maine and have a dog and are married.
If the characters, including the eccentrics Walt meets and interacts with while Wendy is out of town, weren't so fully dimensional and human, both in the writing and the performances, the film might be unbearable or at least more grating than fun, manly because Walt is a hot mess, and Desmin plays the messiness largely without special pleading or winking at the viewer to let us know he's better than Walt—although he does let us see how emotional and self-punishing and depressed Walt is, which helps us not actively loathe the character. It's a superior lead performance, fully invested and with a lot of sly shadings. The character is part of a rich tradition of borderline antihero-schmucks, incarnated in movies like "The Heartbreak Kid," "Modern Romance" and "The Pallbearer" and a lot of Noah Baumbach's work—people you could understand and appreciate as human beings even if you'd avoid them in real life.
O'Sullivan's Wendy is equally credible as a full person who's also representative of a type. The character is offscreen for most of the movie—the focus is Walt trying to undo his awful screwup while she's trying to get a job at a web-based business that Walt describes as "the Etsy of sustainable shopping." But you're given enough hyper-specific details to get who she is: a super-nice super-achiever, the kind of person who, at age eight, sold 624 cookies to save manatees in Florida. She moved back to Portland, her hometown, because her dad had a heart attack, then stayed there even though he's been recovered for quite some time.
Wendy still loves Walt even though he's been a disappointment since quitting his job. Do either of them plan on having kids? Walt's resentment of Tony interfering in the couple's sex life (Wendy insists the dog sleep between them in bed) would seem to make him a poor candidate for fatherhood. Even fur-baby fatherhood, really; pets are children, too, of a sort. Walt's reaction to losing Tony is largely a narcissist's reaction. He doesn't want to lose Wendy, and he doesn't want to see himself as a failure or an incompetent. It's not about the dog at first, and it takes a pretty long time for it to be about the dog (though when Walt cries for Tony at last, it's genuine). None of this mitigates against "Hangdog" as a comedy. Nobody should care if a character is likable or does what they would've done in a given situation as long as they're believable and compelling. The problem here is that I'm not convinced the film has put a lot of thought into the sadder and more disturbing implications of Walt's behavior.
"Hangdog" isn't a particularly weighty or deep film and doesn't have aspirations in that direction. It's a "hangout" movie in the tradition of a lot of memorable American 1990s indie comedies ("Walking and Talking" and "Clerks" spring to mind, though there are a lot of others) and the films of Richard Linklater and the under-appreciated HBO series "High Maintenance," which was built around the routine of a Brooklyn pot dealer.
But it's substantial and thoughtful because of how Walt incarnates a very specific type of existential American dread — the depths of his self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy aren't unlocked and explored until pretty deep into the story — and also because Cascella and Cordery have filled the script with supporting characters who are richly drawn enough to be the stars of their own film. I'll avoid describing most of them here because you never know when the next one is going to appear or what they'll want. Still, praise is due Matthew Delimiter's David, who contacts Walt after seeing the flyer and turns out to have an unnerving, surprising energy and agenda; Catherine Curtin's Buffy, who turns out to be a key unlocking the resolution of the story; and Barbara Rosenblat as Marianne, the couple's blunt-spoken, hard-living neighbor. Marianne becomes like a big sister or surrogate mom to poor Walt and shocks him out of self-pity with well-timed barbs ("You look like you ordered the pie and they served you a hot buttered turd").
The movie's quality jumps a lot in the final 15 minutes, when it seems as if it's reached a very conventional but basically satisfying ending and chooses to go on, not because it doesn't know when to quit, but because it's not done with Walt and Wendy yet.
As for the fate of the dog: this is a comedy, not a tragedy. Tony is fine at the end. Everybody's basically fine at the end. I still have my doubts about Wendy and Walt in the long-term. I think the film does, too, but doesn't want to harsh our buzz.
