A series of dog films produced in the last three years is perhaps responding to the contemporary America. It’s almost like canine therapy through cinema for a society seeking to lower their blood pressure. Films like A Dog’s Purpose , A Dog’s Journey and A Dog’s Way Home provide both escapism and heroism in the most unreal ways possible – rebirth included. The purpose of these films appear to be to generate a sense of comfort and joy by projecting dogs – who can do no wrong – as our angelic companions.
A man-animal relationship is undoubtedly the most unconditional but A Dog’s Journey doesn’t tap into that purity. It instead creates scenarios (and lives after lives) to manipulate emotions, which is acceptable if you’re unaware of being manipulated. That’s not the case with this film.
- Director: Gail Mancuso
- Cast: Marg Helgenberger, Betty Gilpin, Henry Lau, Kathryn Prescott, Dennis Quaid, Josh Gad, Emma Volk
- Storyline: A dog keeps reincarnating to guard his human
A Dog’s Journey has several layers of contrived storytelling. Taking off from the last film, A Dog’s Purpose, Ethan (Dennis Quaid) now has a granddaughter, Clarity June a.k.a. CJ (Kathryn Prescott) and a widowed daughter-in-law, Gloria (Betty Gilpin). He trusts his dog from the previous film, Bailey, to protect CJ. It takes Bailey several lifetimes as different breeds to ensure CJ ends up happy. Along the way, there’s an alcoholic mother, abusive teenage boyfriend, artistic struggle, cancer diagnosis and just general loneliness. The dog, of course, helps through it all, and you can see how conveniently he/she does it. The outlandish coincidences further expose the film’s inadequacy to be organic and real. When you have a subject that inherently is packed with emotions, the need to manipulate is indicative of lazy storytelling.
Despite riding on the ‘cute’ factor, the film’s visual purely serve its story. They are so generic and cliched that it is quite a task to distinguish this film from A Dog’s Way Home , which released in India a couple of weeks ago. The film opens with a sweeping shot of a farm with a tractor carrying Ethan and Bailey. It’s bucolic and representative of middle America. We later see a chaotic New York but the setting is unable to permeate into the narrative. There are glimpses of what breeds do urban folks prefer over farm owners, but I wish the film had more observations like these.
When a dog lives different lives, in different geographies and lives with people from various social, cultural, economical and racial backgrounds, how do the experiences vary and what insights does the dog gather? A narrative working in isolation is easy storytelling. Hollywood needs to up its game when it comes to canine films. For a therapeutic experience, there’s always a dog available off-screen.
