The Net­flix queue is, by its nature, the oppo­site of the instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion of a rental store. You add movies you think you might want to see some day, then sit back and wait for them to arrive in an order decided by com­puter, accord­ing to fac­tors and algo­rithms out­side of your con­trol. Enough time had passed since I added Year of the Dog that I could no longer recall why. Pos­si­bly I read a good review some­where, or maybe I was curi­ous about the sud­den reap­pear­ance of Molly Shan­non (part of “my” Sat­ur­day Night Live of the mid-90s — am I right that peo­ple feel the most affec­tion for the SNL cast of their col­lege years?). But I feel baited and switched; this is not a drama or roman­tic com­edy but rather a movie with an agenda.

Writer/director Mike White’s Year of the Dog is a feature-length drama­ti­za­tion of Janeane Garofalo’s gag “You can love your pets, but you can’t love your pets.” Not unlike Lily in the recent Dork Report screen­ing of Eagle Vs. Shark, Peggy (Shan­non) is a gen­tle sweet­heart, but alien­ated and lonely. Her rela­tion­ship with brother Pier (Thomas McCarthy from The Wire Sea­son 5) and sister-in-law Bret (Laura Dern) is dis­tant at best, and her clos­est friends are obliv­i­ous workmates.

This commute’s a bitch

When she loses the uncon­di­tional love of her dog Pen­cil, she becomes hun­gry for, as she puts it, a sin­gle word to define her. On a date with Al (John C. Reilly), Peggy demon­strates a dis­like of hunt­ing, the seed from which her new fer­vor for an ani­mal activist lifestyle grows. Her one word, she decides, is to be “vegan.”

Her new life teases her at first with the pos­si­bil­ity of love with Newt (Peter Sars­gaard), but he is too much like her, or what she is soon to become: unable to love humans nearly as much as ani­mals. From here, the tone shifts to the dis­turb­ing, as Peggy causes her life to fall apart. Her clumsy activism costs her her job and fam­ily, and she soon descends to theft and attempted murder.

You can love your pets, but you can’t love your pets

And yet, the movie appears to present her ulti­mate state as a happy end­ing of sorts. She chooses to be friend­less and unloved, but has found mean­ing and pur­pose. The most impor­tant part of the movie is miss­ing: what hap­pens between Peggy hit­ting rock bot­tom (where she becomes unable to func­tion in soci­ety) and her total ascen­dance as a self-assured being? I don’t buy the sud­den switcheroo that it’s all OK because she has dis­cov­ered herself.

Would real-life ani­mal activists find Peggy and Newt amus­ingly exag­ger­ated ver­sions of them­selves, or insult­ing stereo­types? Speak­ing as the owner of two res­cued casts, it strikes me that choos­ing the love of ani­mals over that of peo­ple is a kind of men­tal ill­ness that begs for cor­rec­tion, not celebration.

Offi­cial movie site: www.yearofthedogmovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to me.

•