What does Hollywood love more than superheroes? Dogs. There’s no dearth of films on the man’s best friend, and their connection with human beings. In them, the canine is portrayed to have emotions that humans understand and easily process. In Charles Martin Smith’s A Dog’s Way Home , Bella is that dog. She is given a voice (Bryce Dallas Howard) and her thoughts are what humans hope their dog is thinking. She justifies her every action in a calculatedly cute voice, projecting human desires on an animal. This device is indicative of the film’s core philosophy: to manipulate using a tried-and-tested audio-visual model.
- Director: Charles Martin Smith
- Cast: Ashley Judd, Jonah Hauer-King, Edward James Olmos, Alexandra Shipp, Wes Studi, Bryce Dallas Howard
- Story: Bella loses her way after running away from a temporary home
When a dog is the only animal given a voice, but you’re more interested in other silent beings surrounding her, you know something is awry. On her journey back home, after getting lost in New Mexico, Bella meets a cougar, who she christens Big Kitten. The wild animal’s enigmatic journey and silences are more impactful, making you speculate if A Dog's Way Home would stand out if the filmmaker challenged himself and denied Bella that voice. That would be a tougher task, and the outcome would not be as fluffy and predictable. The filmmaker instead dishes out generic and sanitised visuals and convenient situations, where you can predict three or four hurdles before the resolution. Written in a bland three-act structure, the film really pushes the envelope in only one department: manipulation. From a veteran support group who are emotionally healed by dogs to a saccharine cover of ‘Lean On Me’ after a rescue scene, the film plays to a gallery of mindless consumers.
The film has some noteworthy elements like the inclusion of an interracial gay couple and creating conflict through banning of pitbulls (“dog racism”). But these are needles in a haystack. Beyond that, A Dog’s Way Home is centered around a single mother (Ashley Judd) and her son, Lucas (Jonah Hauer-King), a middle-class white American family. The dog’s encounters with people of other socio-economic backgrounds never lead to anything significant, nor does it majorly alter her course. It’s nature that often takes precedence but the execution is quite plastic, much like the CGI-generated animals themselves. If a dog has to make a 400-mile journey across more than two years, there’s enough scope to go beyond regurgitation of old dog film tropes. If canine love is all we wanted, there’s enough of that to be had off-screen.
