Bad dog, good book, bad movie

There are two things dogs can easily elicit from humans without even trying: laughter and tears, and sometimes you get both in one go. Our Labrador Retriever Freeway makes us laugh hysterically whenever she can’t decide whether to follow me or my husband R. when we’re in separate rooms. She will go in one direction, then midway will do a figure eight to go the other way, and then change her mind again — all the while her tail is wagging wildly and her face looks confused, her loyalty divided. In the end, she will slump her body — half of it in the bedroom where I am and half of it outside where my husband is.

We scold her, we tease her, we spank her butt, we yell at her for the bad things she does — oh and there have been many throughout the years — and she will act like she has just been given a reward. No grudges. No complaints. No bitterness.

She adores us as if God carved our names in her heart.    

Sometimes, this dog who fills the void in our family life (along with our Miniature Schnauzer Alleyway) makes us want to cry with her unflinching loyalty and love.

And so it is with Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog,  journalist and Philadelphia Inquirer columnist John Grogan’s ode to his dog Marley. The book begins as he and his wife Jenny are beginning their married life together. Still childless, Jenny is feeling the need to nurture (she has killed their houseplant, and as any new wife knows, you are supposed to progress from plants to pets to babies, preferably keeping all of them alive) and so they get a puppy.

Both journalists, the Grogans are living in Florida when they decide to buy a wiggly yellow Lab they named after the singer Bob Marley; their other choices for this “Clearance Dog” (he was literally on sale at the breeder’s) were Chelsea (but “no boy dog would be caught dead with that name”) and Hunter (“What are you, on some macho sportsman trip?” Jenny ridicules Grogan). 

Marley’s adventures range from crashing through screen doors, gouging out the drywall in their garage every time there is a thunderstorm (which is pretty much routine in Southern Florida), eating the couches, eating a necklace, eating cat poop, getting kicked out of obedience school, crapping on a dog beach and shutting it down (thanks to diarrhea due to his swimming with his mouth open and ingesting seawater), running after a female dog in heat and taking with him the restaurant table he is tethered to, interrupting Grogan’s showers because he wants to drink, stealing food from the couple’s firstborn, and becoming an extra in a movie (The Last Home Run), which unfortunately goes straight to video.

Despite his routine destruction of their house and scaring off all possible dog sitters, Marley becomes the Grogans’ first baby. He sees the couple’s lives improving — from a two-bedroom bungalow to a ritzier address to a house on a two-acre land with a meadow — and also through tough times like when Jenny miscarries her first baby and Grogan brings home his despondent wife.

Our rambunctious, wired dog stood with his shoulders between Jenny’s knees, his big, blocky head resting quietly in her lap. His tail hung flat between his legs, the first time I could remember it not wagging whenever he was touching one of us. His eyes were turned up at her, and he whimpered softly. She stroked his head a few times and then, with no warning, buried her face in the thick of his neck and began sobbing. Hard, unrestrained, from-the-gut sobbing. They stayed like that for a long time, Marley statue-still, Jenny clutching him to her like an oversized doll. And then without lifting her head, she raised one arm up towards me, and I joined her on the couch and wrapped my arms around her. There the three of us stayed, locked in our embrace of shared grief.

When the Grogan kids are just starting school, Marley’s dog years are getting the better of him. He becomes deaf, and “as age took its toll, Marley had good days and bad days. He had good minutes and bad minutes, too, sandwiched so close together sometimes it was hard to believe it was the same dog.”

And finally, the decision Grogan had feared he had to make comes: whether to put his dog to sleep or subject him to surgery he might not recover from. Grogan begs his dog: “You’re going to tell me when it’s time, right?”

Just before the euthanasia, Grogan finds his dog unconscious on the vet’s stretcher.

I got on my knees and ran my fingers through his fur, I lifted each floppy ear in my hands…Then I dropped my forehead against his and sat there for a long time. I wanted to make him understand some things.   

“You know that stuff we’ve always said about you?” I whispered. “What a total pain you are? Don’t believe it. Don’t believe it for a minute, Marley.” There was something I had never told him, that no one ever had. I wanted him to hear it before he went.

“Marley,” I said, “You are a great dog.”

It is scenes like these — so well written and so full of the emotions dog owners feel for their pets — that are so poorly translated into the movie starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. Marley the dog becomes the background to the Grogans, not the other way around, as Grogan wrote it.

Yes, you will reach for a box of Kleenex when watching the movie; yes, you will laugh. But the movie feels more like it is about Aniston and Wilson than about Marley and their relationship with him.

It lacks the lucidity of a pet owner’s relationship with his pet, which was so magnificently portrayed in My Dog Skip, set in 1940s Mississippi.

Books are never easy to translate into film, and Marley the movie simply sacrificed the wrong parts. You see Marley old, but never really see him getting old. Before you know it, the damn lovable dog needs to be put down. You see the Grogan kids all broken up in grief, but why? The movie is a lazy shortcut to something that could have been really great. 

Marley the movie is sweet and sad and sentimental, but ultimately, a disappointment for not going deep enough into the relationship between the mischievous dog and his masters.

The filmmakers should have realized that sometimes, you have to make the dog the star of the story to make the human stars really light up the screen.