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DENVER WESTWORD
http://movies.westword.com/Issues/2006-09-07/film/movies2.html
From westword.com
Originally published by Westword 2006-09-07
?2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
Dog-Eat-Dog World
The Dogwalker is the real thing -- and you don't even have to like dogs.
By Bill Gallo
When we first see Ellie (Diane Gaidry), the younger of two damaged heroines in Jacques Thelemaque's The Dogwalker, she's the picture of unhinged desperation. Ill-concealed by big sunglasses, her heavily battered face features a recently split lower lip, one so swollen that she can barely make herself understood when requesting that a startled airline counter agent sell her a ticket on the next flight going . . .anywhere. As much as by Ellie's beaten-prizefighter visage, we are immediately struck by an odd dislocation in time. Seemingly, we have been cast back into the pre-9/11 world, where a distraught woman can literally run onto an airliner without any evidence of alarm from airport security and where, a moment later, her crazed ex-boyfriend -- obviously the one responsible for those appalling bruises -- can suddenly materialize at the cabin door, shouting her name.
At first, this entire scene feels like a case of blatant cultural ignorance on the part of the filmmakers, but it takes on a kind of super-reality: So vulnerable is Ellie to violence and (we soon learn) her own self-destructive carelessness that the usual rules and protections don't apply to her. From the beginning, we get the uneasy sense that she's a tragedy in the making, a time bomb fitted with a short fuse.
Thus does writer/director Thelemaque, who grew up in Niwot, set the ominous mood of this quiet, beautifully acted drama, which was made on a small indie budget and inhabited by an unknown cast. It's about the unlikely alliance of two gravely wounded women and, not coincidentally, about the nature of dogs. By the way, this Dogwalker should not be confused with two other film projects that bear exactly the same title -- an "outsider" comedy from 2002 starring Will Foster Stewart, and a new Reese Witherspoon vehicle, still in production, based on a bestseller by former New York publishing exec Leslie Schnur.
As it happens in Thelemaque's film, Ellie's randomly selected airplane lands in Los Angeles. "Here I am, wherever that is," this drifty fatalist declares. In time, though, she discovers where she is. A stray on the streets, she's brutally relieved of her scant cash when she tries to score some pot, runs afoul of a creepy predator and grabs a meal from a trash can. But salvation of a sort is en route, in the person of a wary, embittered old casualty named Betsy (Pamela Gordon), whose voice is a smoke-cured rumble, whose view of life is as cynical as it is guilt-ridden, and who obsesses about her dogwalking business. Both women have terrible scars and secrets: They remind you less of those break-out rebels Thelma and Louise than of the downtrodden refugees Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo. Like that pair, they form a shaky, hard-won friendship out of mutual need, the specifics of which Thelemaque reveals in alluring fragments.
It wouldn't do to reveal much more, except to say that Betsy, who has the hollow, haunted look of a prisoner beneath her mask of furious self-reliance, is clearly not long for this world, and that her only chance for some kind of redemption lies in transferring wisdom to the rootless, clueless Ellie. Meanwhile, the film makes an ongoing metaphor of the parallels between human life and dog instinct, which is at times intriguing and at others irritating. In fact, there's a bit of sophomore-year clunkiness in Thelemaque's writing, and his frequent philosophizing (this is Mondo Cane: We all act like dogs, more or less) can feel shallow and forced. But the two lead performances are so authentic and heartfelt that in the end, The Dogwalker is irresistible. Between Gaidry's touching emotional nakedness and Gordon's world-weary need, a great chemistry develops. Few movies produce such a brilliant and heartrending collision of character. The whole thing is made even more effective by the obscurity of the actresses. It's as if we're watching life, not art.
The supporting cast, too, is just right: Lyn Vaus is a good guy who gives Ellie another glimmer of hope; Kerry Bishop hits the mark as a Hollywood star whose dog Ellie manages to lose; and veteran Lisa Jane Persky, the film's most familiar face, avoids the usual wacky-in-L.A. cliches while portraying a dog-whisperer who hangs around the park where the ailing Betsy and her new assistant, Ellie, exercise their four-legged charges, which come in all shapes, sizes and temperaments.
The story of two souls in torment finding comfort in each other is as old as drama itself, and it's heartening to see it so skillfully renewed in a film that costs about as much as three weeks' pay for Julia Roberts's chauffeur. Despite a glitch here and there, this is the real thing.
LA Weekly
http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/film-reviews/film-reviews/14328/
THE DOGWALKER The sort of movie that you'd see on Lifetime if that channel actually respected its viewers' taste and intelligence, Jacques Thelemaque's feature directorial debut has been kicking around the festival circuit for five years, and now finally comes to theaters in a leaner cut that jettisons an extraneous subplot to get to the core of its human story. Battered wife Ellie (Diane Gaidry) escapes her life via a flight to Los Angeles, where she rapidly loses everything, but then meets cranky ex-con Betsy (the late Pamela Gordon, who'd be Oscar-worthy if the Academy ever considered truly independent movies), who needs help maintaining her dog-walking business and sees a kind of kindred spirit in the beaten-down transplant. Their ever-changing relationship is the heart of the movie, yet it's also a larger allegory for the way Los Angeles can beat people down and the means they find to survive and even triumph regardless. You don't have to love dogs to get it. (Music Hall) (Luke Y. Thompson)
The KSVY Show
http://www.streamload.com/ksvy/Daedalus_Howell_Show_081006.mp3
Interview with Host Daedalus Howell on his show The
Daedalus Howell Show about "The Dogwalker"
Twitch
http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/007090.html
"Independent film" has become an amorphous and protean category that's truly hard to get one's hands on. These days, amidst the hype and spin, what constitutes an independent film? For my money there is no greater demonstration of the independent filmmaking spirit than a quiet two-character study called The Dogwalker, directed by Jacques Thelemaque and starring real-life partner Diane Gaidry as Ellie Moore, an abused young woman who flees a destructive relationship and subsequently experiences transformational adventures in healing through her conflicted friendship with a misanthropic dogwalker Betsy and the many dogs she manages. Not only was the production of The Dogwalker independently financed over an arduous eight-year period, but it is now being independently distributed, opening Friday, August 11, in the Bay Area at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco, the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley and the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, and then in Los Angeles on Friday, August 25, at the Laemmle Music Hall. For anyone who loves the underlying philosophical principles of independent film, this is a film that should be supported. It's quiet, reflective, tender, and solid. Time to put your money where your mouth is.
Citizen Cinema
http://www.citizencinema.net/2006/08/index.html
In Citizen Cinema Podcast #3 we speak in depth with Jacques Thelemaque and Diane Gaidry, leaders of Filmmakers Alliance and makers of the new feature film, The Dogwalker. We get busy for almost an hour on subjects ranging from work ethics, to film distribution and ultimately, inspiration.
Bay Area Reporter
http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=film&article=221
"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.
New Times, Los Angeles
Hollywood Reporter
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1536271
The Dogwalker
By David Hunter
A young woman flees her physically abusive mate, taking the first flight out of Buffalo to Los Angeles, where she lands with a thud and luckily is befriended by a one-of-a-kind handler of pooches that belong to rich folk living in the hills. A promising debut by writer-director Jacques Thelemaque, "The Dogwalker" is one of those rare outsider-comes-to-L.A. films that captures the city's smoggy human atmosphere of promise and abandon -- and isolation -- without being preachy.
Not to be confused with a 1999 indie comedy of the same name directed by Paul Duran, "Dogwalker" benefits greatly from the lead performances by Diane Galdry and Pamela Gordon ("Chuck & Buck"). As bashed and stoned Ellie, Galdry says a lot without actually having much memorable dialogue. Her character's unreliableness, particularly after Gordon's Betsy -- angrily distrustful but physically deteriorating -- gives her a chance to work and live almost normally, is not the stuff saints are made of. But this is a tale of women who don't fit into the mold of model wives and girlfriends.
Indeed, Ellie and Betsy share the unfortunate experience of men who are physically violent. The latter, it is revealed, has a reputation as a wife who killed her husband. While Ellie does not learn kickboxing or train for the big showdown, it does eventually happen, without straining credibility too much, and she gets the satisfaction of giving her rabid nemesis (Alan Gelfant) a righteous pummeling.
Other characters in the canine-centric milieu include a pet "channeler" (Lyn Vaus), a dog psychic (Lisa Jane Persky) and a starlet (Kerry Bishop) whose four-legged baby is lost by -- as Betsy calls her -- Ellie the "useless pothead punching bag." But even cynical, fading demigods like Betsy have hearts, and Ellie starts to see the benefits of stability and an improving sense of self-worth.
Founders of the producing Filmmakers Alliance, Thelemaque and Gaidry are married in real life, and she's a bona fide dogwalker. Rather than being self-indulgent or pretentious, however, the film comes up with many believable details and changes in direction that enrich the bittersweet central relationship of the two leads. It doesn't hurt having an irresistible pack of furry supporting characters who try, and manage a few times, to steal their scenes.
Los Angeles Times
