"The thing with dogs is they never hide their feelings. They're pure energy and emotion, extremes inside ourselves — intense love, intense savagery."
"So you're saying instead of an inner child, we have an inner dog."
"Humor. Wow! Completely unexpected mental agility — maybe you're not the useless, pothead punching bag that I think you are."
When first we glimpse her, Ellie Moore (Diane Gaidry) has enlisted in her own one-woman Witness Protection Program, pushing past pedestrians at the airport to grab the first plane out of Buffalo, just steps ahead of a mad-dog boyfriend, who has to be physically restrained from getting at her on the plane.
Most men are dogs to Ellie: she's mugged by drug-dealing mutts, propositioned by a creepy upscale john, rejected for waitress work by a basset hound-like fast-food manager. What can she expect when she wakes up from a drunken stupor surrounded by a pack of actual dogs? Yielding to her instinct to run, Ellie bashes her already battered skull into the nearest tree. She has fallen down a kind of urban rabbit-hole, emerging into the otherworldly haunts of the dogwalkers and dog-owners of Laurel Canyon.
One of the natural leaders of this enclave is one of the most misanthropic female characters since Margaret Hamilton terrorized little girls and their little dogs. Looking a bit like Anne Bancroft in a fright wig, and acting like a meaner version of Ratso Rizzo, Betsy Wright (the late Pamela Gordon) administers tough love as if it were New Year's Eve champagne.
Writer/director Jacques Thelemaque (Gaidry's off-screen husband) resists anthropomorphizing the dogs, instead investing his human characters with animal attributes. Ellie, a kind of bedraggled cocker spaniel badly in need of obedience training, meets Betsy, the human pit bull, whom rumor credits with murdering her husband. Ellie's rocky road back to full human status is enlivened by a morose, pot-smoking poodle of a boyfriend, Walter (Lyn Vaus), and a Cheshire Cat-like pet psychic, Alyson (Lisa Jane Persky).
Your opinion of The Dogwalker will depend on whether you can endure a very gritty first act that references virtually every horror facing battered women. For a male-loving homosexual, it's hard to adjust to just how loathsome a lot of guys can be when given the whip-hand in a relationship. But in truth, Thelemaque and his brave cast are more interested in delving into why interspecies love is far more appealing to so many humans than affection for other humans of any gender.
As the recovering survivor from a family of dedicated animal-lovers, and as a former dogwalker who counts among his most treasured moments time spent with the dog-loving AIDS widows of Silverlake's Lucile Avenue, I appreciate a dogcentric universe shorn of all cute pet tricks. Instead of cuddly pseudo-humans, the many dogs in Ellie's life act like temple gods or guides through the underworld.
LA story
The Dogwalker is in many ways a dark comedy about a micro-slice of LA madness in the tradition of Laurel Canyon and Ellie Parker, in which an odd job — record producer, aspiring actress, dogwalker — becomes a window into the normally invisible ways of life. A terrific wordless scene has Ellie and Betsy pass into a hillside mansion past layers of immigrant hired help, and into a bedroom where the dog of the manor awaits his leash stroll.
Gaidry is sensational in a role that requires a quiet husbanding of every sundry emotion, knowing just when to hold back and let loose. Two crying jags — one in front of the fierce Betsy, another for the benefit of a Viking-like bar trick after good sex — demonstrate how an artist can go from zero to 60 and reveal an entire lifetime of pain without soliciting stock responses from other characters or the audience.
Pamela Gordon died in 2003, a couple of years after filming wrapped. This performance as the one of the screen's most irascible and least sentimental guardian angels is the best kind of memorial.