Film Review : A Dog's Purpose

Film : A Dog’s Purpose
Director: Lasse Hallström
Cast: Josh Gad, Dennis Quaid, Peggy Lipton, K.J. Apa
Runtime: 120 minutes
Release : By Reliance Entertainment from 31st March eye on Summer vacation season


Well known US humorist W. Bruce Cameron wrote novel ‘A Dog's Purpose’ in 2010. It was on New York Times’ best-selling list for 49 weeks. It chronicles a dog's journey through several lives via reincarnation and it was interesting to read that how he looks for his purpose through each of his lives.

A sequel followed in May 2012, titled A Dog’s Journey, following the same dog after the events of the previous book. The film rights of the book were bought by DreamWorks. A film in the same name is released in January 2017,  now slated to be released on 31st March in India.

The movie, directed by Lasse Hallström, adapts W. Bruce Cameron’s best-selling novel, which tracks the spirit of a dog across several decades, dogs, owners and experiences.

First up is Bailey (voiced, as all the dogs are, by Josh Gad), a retriever who grows up with a boy in the sixties. Later, the dog  is reincarnated as Ellie, a Chicago police dog; then Tino, a corgi; and finally, as a St. Bernard mix named Buddy.

Plot

The four stories are a buffet of cardboard characters, plot contrivances and emotional clichés, set mostly in some idealized nostalgic country-side past (the place is called Townsville). It feels like a hoary 1970s Hallmark special, when feel-good TV movies were bland and studiously inoffensive. There are some very tame depictions of poverty, inner-city violence and alcoholism. Bailey’s take on the mean-drunk father: “Dad always talked so loud when he smelled that way.

The film is told from the perspective of Bailey (Josh Gad), a dog who is reborn five times over its half-century or so of existence, but is especially hung up on the second one, a long, idyllic farm life with a boy named Ethan and his parents. As often happens with these talking-dog movies, Bailey’s sentience raises more questions than it answers: Why, for example, was Bailey born for the first time in 1950s Michigan, if good dogs are continually reborn? Was there an increase in dog souls to go along with the economic boom of the era? Why is Bailey the only dog that can talk? And why is Bailey’s consciousness developed enough to question the meaning of existence, but not developed enough to learn basic words?

These questions are not addressed by the film itself, which has much more mundane concerns (playing fetch to sappy music, mostly) on its mind. Dramatic conflicts—of which there must be some, or else you might as well stay home and watch Animal Planet—are sketched in the broadest strokes, and expressed through the medium of the dog smelling alcohol on Dad’s breath or knocking down a photo of his owner’s estranged ex-wife with his tail. The scariest sequence in the film—coincidentally, also the one whose filming caused the uproar over animal abuse—comes in Bailey’s life as a female police dog in ’70s Chicago, where she sacrifices herself by jumping into a river to save a kidnapped girl. The funniest is probably Bailey’s life in ’80s suburbia as a lazy Corgi living with a family whose kids like to dress him up in cute costumes, though rest assured that the jokes are as broad as the drama. Think not one, but two sequences of the dog ruining an important dinner by knocking over the table. The dialogue in all of them is comically devoid of subtext.

All of Bailey’s lives are shot with gradually decreasing brightness, until Bailey ends up chained to a post outside a run-down house owned by a couple that in an edgier film would have probably been meth addicts. That sequence is shot in a muted gray, but then Bailey escapes and follows his instincts back to the farm where he lived out his second, best life, now owned by an adult Ethan acted by Dennis Quaid. Newly bathed in sunlight, the film once again amps up the sentimentality, culminating in a groan-worthy title line. So what is a dog’s purpose? To provide gentle, forgettable entertainment for moviegoers who lament that ‘they’ don’t make ‘nice’ movies anymore, apparently. For the rest of us, it’s more like a 100-minute nap.


In all, this film the fact-based reality of how dogs are. From scene one, the dog(s) inexplicably struggle with the existential question of ‘what is my purpose?’ because … humans can’t stop projecting themselves onto their pets. Dog No. 4 finally cracks it, and it’s about as illuminating as if a dog figured it out: ‘Be here now — that’s a dog’s purpose.’

Who should go to see the Movie

Young children, although they’ll have to be mature enough to be able to handle multiple emotionally manipulative scenes of dogs dying. The elderly, perhaps, but only the sort of older people who think the culture stumbled blindly off of a moral cliff some-time in the mid sixties. The film revels, along with its unabashed appeal to sentimental memories of childhood pets, in mom-and-apple-pie nostalgia that no longer exists, if it ever existed.

Verdict

Over all a feel good movie !


Pradeep  Gupta