The inner film critic grows restless. No, she says. You are not going to cry during the fluffy puppy movie. You are going to think sternly about the slippery machinations of imperialist cinema.
Just look at this trash. Could Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson be more status quo? Because she’s a lady, she wants children. Because he’s a lad, he gets her a Labrador instead. She’s a hotshot writer who, in due course, becomes a stay-at-home mommy. He wants to be Hunter S Thompson, but is endlessly compromised by domesticity and marriage; long before the inevitable move to the countryside with kids in tow, he is reluctantly churning out a cosy column detailing his home life with Jen and Marley, “the world’s worst dog.”
There is some predictable tomfoolery involving chewed furniture and an obedience school run by Kathleen Turner, set-pieces that form a canine riposte to the great lol cats of the internet.
But Marley And Me sneaks up and coalesces into something unexpected. Contrary to first impressions, this is no rom-com. This is, rather, the complete, intimate history of a dog and a communal celebration of canine companionship.
Like John Grogan’s best-selling memoir, the unlikely hit source for this gargantuan hit movie, David Frankel’s film grapples with big soft-hearted ideas about puppy-love and how it defines a family, then, unmercifully takes the hapless viewer out into the dark woods where, after 13 lively years, the stoic, four-legged hero takes refuge so he might spare his master the pain of seeing him go.
Take that, audience. The inner film critic conjures up an entire fictionalised sequence in which Jean Luc Godard shoots a kitten in front of a placard that reads “American Cinema”. It’s no good. The scene with the old dog bravely going up the steps for the last time keeps edging out all other considerations. The adorable puppy wins. Pass the tissues.