Marley & Me
The Marley in "Marley & Me" is some kind of Labrador retriever. But don't make the mistake the marketing folks at Twentieth Century Fox are making. Marley is no dog. If you threw a lion's mane on him, he'd be Aslan in one of those Narnia movies. He looks like he could eat one Jennifer Aniston a day. Luckily for Aniston, she and Owen Wilson are about the only things he doesn't chew up in this bald-faced tearjerker based on the bestselling bald-faced tearjerker by John Grogan.
For the film, Wilson plays Grogan, a reporter turned columnist at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel who buys his wife, Jenny (Aniston), also a journalist, a puppy as a baby substitute. The babies show up anyway, and the dog stays despite his amazing ability to destroy a room in less than five seconds. Eventually, Jenny stops working as the family expands; and the stress to be successful starts to get to John - as much as it can for a man played by an actor who rarely seems bothered by anything on screen. Grogan's career appears charmed, but he's never quite fulfilled.
The movie is torn. It wants to honestly explore the natural wear-and-tear of the Grogan marriage. But it also seems OK with being something that could pass as a midseason replacement on ABC. For that, Eric Dane's handsome face pops up too often as Sebastian, a co-worker and buddy of Grogan. Sebastian is shallow, conceited, and chronically horny. Their walks together double as excuses for him to use Grogan's dog and children to pick up women.
Working from a script credited to veterans Scott Frank and Don Roos, director David Frankel fulfills many of the requirements of his assignment. The film just needs to be smoothly guided to its sober second half from its rambunctious first part where, among other events, a run-down Kathleen Turner appears for a scene as a grouchy dog trainer. (Her commanding presence is sorely missed for the rest of the movie. What might she and Michael Douglas have done with this thing 20 years ago?)
Frankel appeared to be having a lot more fun returning some classic-Hollywood glamour to the movies with "The Devil Wears Prada." The scale is smaller here. There is one terrific sequence, though: an energetic montage in which Grogan recites his daily activities while the film editor, Mark Livolsi, assembles corresponding images. "Woke up with a kiss from Marley." "Planted an orange tree." "Went to work with writer's block." "Watched models posing on the beach." "Watched Marley eat a pillow." "Wrote a column about gas prices." "Got into a fight with Dad about money." "Went to the emergency room." What an exhilarating encapsulation of the mundane symbiosis of a columnist's personal and professional lives. It's almost as good as watching Meryl Streep drop a coat on Anne Hathaway's desk a dozen times in a row or seeing Wilson and Vince Vaughn in "Wedding Crashers" carouse for two minutes. (Livolsi edited those, too.)
The ingenuity of that blow-by-blow sequence with Grogan gets at the central problem with this movie: The rest of it is excruciatingly plain. Grogan's book was about how much that dog meant to his family. The film isn't built around Marley so much as Marley has been built into the proceedings as another character. He's not a main course now. He's an ingredient. You see why the Grogans love that dog so much. He's theirs. But the movie never captures the crucial leap that made the book a hit. It's never "Marley & Us."
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com /ae/movienation.
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