**/****
written and directed by Thom Fitzgerald
by Walter Chaw Thom Fitzgerald makes movies that celebrate the cult of himself. Carefully nourished by his sense of smug self-satisfaction like a private pleasure garden, his pictures, numbering five, are auteur in the sense that they're predictable now: one cannot fail to be scolded when sitting down to a Fitzgerald piece, and even his best work (The Hanging Garden) shows flashes of the pedantic sermonizer he's about to become. The topics into infinity are the holy trinity of the father, oppressed subcultures (especially homosexuals); the son, AIDS; and the holy ghost, Fitzgerald himself, floating above it all with an air of moral superiority, wielding his baton of obvious metaphor and loaded arguments. Consider The Wild Dogs, a film set in post-Ceaucescu Bucharest overrun by stray dogs that function as a lead-pipe metaphor for the cast-offs and victims of the dictators savage reign. Beggars tainted by what John Frankenheimer would have dubbed "freakism" are grounded by Fitzgerald himself as a pasty pornographer seeking to exploit the barely legal women of Romania; in the gesture of casting himself the exploiter, the filmmaker sees himself absolved of his sins of exploitation, but not nearly enough to forgive the condescension that oozes from every frame of the picture. With no connection too clear not to be elucidated and no character too stock to be underlined, The Wild Dogs casts light on a worthy topic by highlighting exactly the sort of trap a filmmaker can fall into when he believes himself to be smarter–better, somehow–than an audience that must get tired of being underestimated.
