Movie review: Laurie Anderson doc ‘Heart of a Dog’ sparkles with her wisdom, wit

“Heart of a Dog” shouldn’t work. At all. But its maker, writer-director Laurie Anderson, has spoken in interviews of the value of having good “tweedar,” in order to ward off twee excesses and preciousness in risky undertakings.

In this 75-minute cine-essay, gorgeously wrought, the most durable of Hydra-headed performance artists pays loving homage to one dog and, more obliquely, one man.

The dog is Lolabelle, a rat terrier, who lived 12 years until the year 2011. The man is Anderson’s husband, singer-songwriter Lou Reed, who spent 21 years with Anderson before his death from liver cancer in 2013. She made the film, created the animated segments, rigged up the dog-cam shots, dove into family home movies and composed a simple, aching musical score, as a way of exploring love and loss.

It sounds sentimental, icky even, but “Heart of a Dog” sparkles with its creator’s wisdom and droll philosophical insight. The film’s density recalls many of Anderson’s theatrical projects – full of visual layering, aural manipulations, flurries of language flashed on screens.

Here, though, there’s a simple and beguiling hook. Lolabelle acts as the conduit, the mistress of ceremonies for her own tribute. We see footage of Anderson and Lolabelle hiking in the mountains of Northern California. As the dog eyes the sky, nervously, for predators, Anderson recalls the fear in her fellow New Yorkers’ eyes in the post-9/11 era. That metaphor shouldn’t work; it’s dangerously facile. But Anderson’s tweedar is nearly unfailing. We go with it. We see Anderson’s world through her eyes, and her dog’s.

In one section of the film, her Buddhist instructor’s teachings on the difference between feeling sad and being sad turn into a design for living, catharsis in the wake of loss. How all this works together, the canine aspects with the musings on America’s manic devotion to surveillance, defies logic and even lucid description.

Many documentarians have used home movies, childhood relics from the age of Kodachrome and funny winter hats, to deal one way or the other with their lives on screen. “Heart of a Dog” is the latest, and one of the most delicate. The film culminates in the retelling of an incident taking place when Anderson was a preteen, involving her younger brothers, a stroller on the ice and a potentially fatal accident.

Watching “Heart of a Dog,” I was flung back to the early Reagan years, when Anderson’s cult hit single “O Superman” mesmerized millions. In that song, which sounds like it was recorded tomorrow, the strange robo-quality of old answering machines (“Hello? This is your mother. Are you there? Are you coming home?”) is used to signify what artists leave behind, or aside, while they pursue their pursuits. In “Heart of a Dog,” Anderson returns that call and goes home, for her mother’s memorable deathbed farewell monologue, and for a knot of memories the movie unties without reducing to pathos.

It shouldn’t work, as I said. But it does, and I love it.