A love-hate thing

ABOUT two years ago, Mike White told Molly Shannon he wanted to write a movie for her.

“He never would tell me what it was about. And then he [finally] said it was about a brother and a sister around Christmas, and maybe it was on a college campus,” Shannon says. “Then it obviously changed.”

White’s screenplay turned into “Year of the Dog,” which has nothing to do with a brother and a sister, does not unfold around Christmas and isn’t set on any college campus.

Shannon, at least, is still its star.

Opening Friday, it’s one of the spring’s most personal movies and arguably one of the season’s trickiest sells.

With a background of light, happy music, trailers for the movie make “Year of the Dog” look like a quirky romantic comedy in which Shannon parries with potential suitors Al (John C. Reilly) and Newt (Peter Sarsgaard). There’s some fleeting flirtations with both men in the film, but the core of the narrative is more troubling. Reviewing the film at the Sundance Film Festival, Variety said it’s “more situation tragedy than situation comedy.”

Shannon, the “Saturday Night Live” alumna, plays Peggy, a spinster in training with an unusually strong connection to her dog, Pencil, and not much else. Peggy and Pencil watch movies together and share a bed. If Peggy becomes upset with Pencil, she tells the beagle, “Mommy’s mad!” When Pencil apparently gets into some poison and dies, Peggy’s life begins to come undone.

Around the same time she meets Al, a neighbor who also lost a dog.

Al: She died too young. Only 6.

Peggy: How’d she die?

Al: I shot her in Wyoming. You want more wine?

White’s screenplay credits include the mainstream Jack Black hits “Nacho Libre,” a riff on Mexican wrestling, and “School of Rock,” a jokey movie about a grade-school band. But the 36-year-old writer also penned the unconventional movies “Chuck & Buck,” about a childhood friend turned stalker, and “The Good Girl,” an often-enigmatic romance starring Jennifer Aniston. White’s new film, which he also directed, owes much more to those latter two films.

“The idea of the movie is to embrace nonconformity,” White says.

That eccentric subject is not just Peggy’s grief over a pet. The movie is at its center a story of a lonely person finding a purpose. For Peggy, that calling is animal rights, and she jeopardizes any number of relationships -- both personal and professional -- as she becomes a different person. She begins the film as introvert and ends it as an iconoclast.

“She makes some really bad choices,” Shannon says. “And it’s confusing. Some people might find her really hard to sympathize with. At different screenings, the same scene can get two totally different reactions. Some people are laughing, and some people are horrified.”

It is precisely these idiosyncrasies, Shannon says, that makes the movie distinctive: “Some people just want characters who are likable. But a lot of people in the world are unlikable.”

A secretary at an indistinct business, she’s the kind of character that is sure to make more than a few moviegoers squirm. Peggy may be the film’s protagonist, but she’s not consistently likable.

For one, she straddles that margin between the kind of person who really loves animals -- and the kind of person who hoards them. There’s a similar demarcation between someone who chooses one set of behaviors for herself and another person who imposes that lifestyle on others. Again, Peggy cycles between both camps.

“Some people really hate her,” White says of his lead character. “There’s actually a percentage of people who are really angry at the movie -- guys, really.”

Man No. 1: Cupcakes!

Woman No. 1: These look diabolical. Oh! ...

Peggy: They’re vegan.

Man No. 1: What?

Peggy: There’s no milk or butter or any animal products in them. No animal was harmed in the making of those cupcakes.

White and Shannon met and bonded on the short-lived 2004 television series “Cracking Up.” White was the show’s creator and Shannon was among its lead performers.

White says he was told by the Fox network, “We want a Mike White show.” But he says as soon as he started work on it, his vision for the series -- about a psychology student (Jason Schwartzman) and his ministrations to a peculiar Beverly Hills family -- was diluted by the network.

Certain he was not the perfect choice to rework his series into a mass-appeal situation comedy that would entertain millions of “American Idol” viewers, White fell into a personal and creative funk. “And then I wrote this really depressing episode that put us even further behind,” he says. The show was canceled after just a few episodes were broadcast.

At the same time, Bootlegger, a former stray cat that had been taken in four years earlier, died in White’s arms after getting into some poison. All of this happened on Christmas Day.

“I had a nervous breakdown,” White says. “It was so emotionally wrenching.”

Perhaps because the experience was so difficult, Shannon became a close friend, and White dedicated himself to writing a part for the 42-year-old actress, who isn’t offered that many starring roles.

The idea about the brother and sister and Christmas and the college town never coalesced, and White felt himself drawn back to the time when his cat died and he and Shannon grew close when “Cracking Up” was falling apart.

“There were a lot of false starts along the way. But then you end up back where you started from,” White says of his “Year of the Dog” screenplay. “Some of the stuff that happens to [Peggy] happened to me but in a different way.”

In Hollywood’s avoid-all-risk calculations, “Year of the Dog” would have been an easy movie to leave at the pound.

In addition to the film’s subject matter and its starring Shannon, White also wanted to make his directorial debut on the film. Some financiers wanted to screen-test Shannon, to see her crying on camera.

But Brad Grey, who was an executive producer on “Cracking Up,” was a fan of White’s. As head of Paramount, Grey helped steer the project toward the studio’s specialty film division, Paramount Vantage. “Year of the Dog” would get made.

Paramount Vantage knows that the movie isn’t for everybody and has put together a marketing campaign almost as unconventional as the film. The studio enlisted the animal rights group PETA and the pet spaying, neutering and adoption organization New Leash on Life as promotional partners. Guests at the film’s premiere at the Paramount lot were offered an opportunity to adopt dogs.

“We’re all in agreement that it’s not an easy sell,” says Paramount Vantage President John Lesher. “It doesn’t fit nearly into any specific genre. But we hope the audience will respond to its themes -- that it’s a unique movie and has a real voice. It’s different from the cookie-cutter stuff that’s out there, and it’s a movie for adults, and there are not a lot of movies for adults out there.”

White, however, conceded that the trailer presents the movie as a little tidier than it really is.

“The trailer makes it seem a little bit more like a romantic comedy. They kind of shy away from her spiral,” he says. “But if I saw a trailer about a woman in an emotional spiral, I’d go see it.”

john.horn@latimes.com