When first approached to consider filling the lead female role in Marley & Me, Jennifer Aniston reportedly turned it down because she didn't find the concept of a "dog movie" to be appealing. To be fair, the stigma attached to such movies is something that's been built up over years of kitschy, overly caricatured features that like to anthropomorphise the animal as something other than what they are. So it's no surprise then that when Aniston eventually got around to reading the core of Marley & Me's story that she turned around and took on the role immediately. You see, rather than just throw out another cute, mischievous and bothersome dog story, John Grogan's book deals with the above, but does so always making sure that the story relates to his own personal experiences to the animal rather than attaching them to him literally. The result is a "dog movie" that is quite like no other in that it actually portrays that which makes a dog lovable in the first place (which is, no doubt, his lack of our own fickleness and in turn an almost endless supply of love) and uses it to show just how much of a family member such an animal can develop into.
Translated to the big screen, Marley & Me works just as well; with the understated performances of Aniston and Wilson (both of whom I have doubted in the past, but sorely regret doing so now) in tow with a very tightly scripted, well paced story that develops so many aspects you won't even notice until the final few scenes, the emotional resonance that director David Frankel seeps from the pages of Grogan's novel is palpable. Just to give a balanced account of the whole, it must be said that this subtlety that transpires over the course of the movie's first two acts can be misleading at first—what seems like an unfocused blend of TV family drama with a conventional dog-story actually develops and transforms into something beautifully refined and constructed; but with this said the time that it takes to get there leaves the entire feature feeling a tad unbalanced. Yet even with this discrepancy, there's still plenty of things to enjoy about the movie's earlier half, and well, that's all part of the build up to act three anyway which turns all that on its head and brings it to a wonderful close.
To say that Marley & Me is a tear-jerker is something of an understatement. While I understand that giving this away obviously points to one direction as to where the movie goes, this aspect is just so natural and important to the feature that it leaves one to wonder why a movie like this hadn't been as well made before. Of course, the answer lies in the fact that much of the feature comes from personal experience from Grogan, and so the narrative is always informed by emotion and that ever-romanticised cloud of memory that helps keep the movie feeling real but at the same time large enough to stop from becoming fully pedestrian. It also helps that Marley & Me isn't purely built on plucking the heart-strings, in fact, very little of such manipulation occurs at all until the closing scenes, and so the restraint that director Frankel shows respects the viewer enough to let them build their own impressions of the characters. Through clever use of the typical dog-movie antics, family drama and character development, the movie feels fun, moving, and funny, but most of all—natural.
For movies such as this, it's real easy to get stuck writing for the cliché characters, stock-room dog jokes (although there a handful present here, but are treated with less theatrical tardiness than is common—Marley is constantly referred to as "the worst dog in the world" because of his tendency to cause a ruckus) and overly mawkish sentiments built around family, but Marley & Me resists this and yet comes out all the more emotionally engaging for it. Most significant of all these points however is that I don't think I've ever felt so much for a dog in a movie as much as I did for Marley, and that's something special right there. Detaching itself from the comical, flat-levelled safe-approach that most dog-movies take and instead making Marley the most emotive subject in the movie is a bold movie and certainly not an easy thing to do, yet Frankel pulls it off wonderfully and does so with a sense of reverence to Grogan's own personal story. No, it's not perfect, and there are certain moments where the movie gets a little too far into tedium for its own good in the middle stages, but in the end you can't help but see why this is all necessary. By building up characters, their ties to each other and their pet dog slowly and with restraint, Marley & Me is one of the very few real dog-movies out there with a real sense of personality, charm and heart that only a real dog could offer.
- A review by Jamie Robert Ward (http://www.invocus.net)
