A lot can happen in one year

If someone took you to see “A Mike White Film,” your expectations might range from the iconoclastic, “Chuck and Buck,” to the quirkily mainstream, “School of Rock.” With “The Good Girl,” “Orange County” and “Nacho Libre” falling somewhere in between on the scale of provocativeness, White is one of the few contemporary screenwriters with a strong enough voice to persist through a variety of directors.

That said, the unfiltered White makes his directing debut with “Year of the Dog,” a scruffy personal comedy about a woman whose devotion to her dog leads to profound changes in her life. With pathos competing equally against the often pungent laughs for the audience’s attention, it’s a movie that is both unsettling and amusing, most comparable to “Chuck & Buck” in tone.

Molly Shannon stars as Peggy, who might be described as a cat lady except that her beloved pet is a dog. She’s a prettily plain, 40ish secretary who has more or less written off the human race when it comes to long-term companionship. That void is filled by the adorable pup, Pencil, who is the center of Peggy’s life, her reason to get up in the morning and the face that eagerly greets her when she comes home from work at night.

When Pencil meets an untimely demise, it sends Peggy into a whirlwind of animal rights activism, partly inspired by a sweet-natured dog trainer and pet-adoption activist named Newt (played with gentle ambiguity by Peter Sarsgaard). Peggy’s new obsession has an adverse effect on her job and her relationships with her family and friends, but White maintains a careful balance between mocking her and building empathy.

Peggy shares the child-like qualities of many of White’s characters: Buck’s doggedness, Holden’s delusional romanticism in “The Good Girl,” Dewey’s enthusiasm in “School of Rock.” Her innocence is probably her most charming trait but also the thing that sets her up for the big fall whenever she’s faced with bad news. Peggy makes a series of disastrous choices, but White does an excellent job of immersing us in the story to the point where their cumulative effect catches us off-guard.

Shannon, in a part written specifically for her, lets a lot of Peggy’s emotion inch across her face in stealthy discoveries.

As a writer, White has always been a practitioner of the cinema of discomfort, creating scenes that are at once off-putting and mesmerizing. As a director, he proves equally adept at mining the elongated awkward moment for both laughter and emotion.

His characters operate in a zone of obliviousness, talking but not really listening to one another. The film is built on scenes between Peggy and the various people in her life in which we are usually way ahead of the characters. However, the train-wreck quality of the encounters makes it impossible to turn away.

Every character has his or her own obsession -- be it an engagement ring for Peggy’s co-worker Layla (Regina King), hunting for her neighbor Al (John C. Reilly) or corporate success for her boss, Robin (Josh Pais) -- making it impossible for any of them to connect with Peggy. Even her brother, Pier (Tom McCarthy), and sister-in-law, Bret (Laura Dern), treat her as a sweet eccentric while they smother their two young children in an overprotective cocoon.

White and Shannon also do something very interesting with Peggy’s political awakening. She’s portrayed as undeniably kooky, and when she bottoms out she’s way down there, but it’s a far cry from the stereotypical, one-joke-and-out portrayal of those seeking a cruelty-free lifestyle. Peggy is nothing but sincere, and her evolution of consciousness is entirely credible. The film questions the stance and asks some hard questions but ultimately presents it with a degree of acceptance.

For what is essentially a comedy, there is a lot of tragedy in “Year of the Dog,” and the immediate effect may be that it’s a bummer of a movie. But White is a clever writer, and many of his best lines will sneak up on you long after you leave the theater. There’s a stealthy sweetness to the movie, a desire to understand those who go their own way, that would seem to be his ultimate aim.

kevin.crust@latimes.com

“Year of the Dog.” MPAA rating: PG-13 for some suggestive references. Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes. In selected theaters.