Review: 'Marley & Me' Is a Real Dog of a Movie

Even dog lovers may want to take "Marley & Me" to the pound. Based on the best-selling book by John Grogan, which chronicled his life with a large, lovable and deeply neurotic dog, "Marley & Me" proves the obvious: Not every book has a movie lurking in it.

Grogan based "Marley & Me" on columns he wrote while working for newspapers in Florida and Philadelphia. Through the miracle of electronic archiving you can still find them online, and they're charming enough. Through an even greater miracle -- the mysterious and insatiable appetite for dog books -- the columns had a second life. But there isn't enough material there for a third outing, and the result is a movie that is slender and directionless.

Life with a dog is a category of existence, the kind of thing that people who have dogs need merely allude to to tap into a shared pool of heartwarming experiences. Do you have a dog? Yes? Toilet drinking. Pillow chewing. The tongue as an alarm clock. Ah!

But this is fodder for "Family Circus" or classic "Peanuts," not a full-length feature. To beef up the narrative, "Marley & Me" intersperses its occasionally amusing glimpses of a very badly trained dog with a more ambitious growing-up narrative. Marley, it turns out, is brought into the life of John and Jennifer Grogan because John fears the natural impulse of Jennifer to have children. Marley is a delaying tactic. But the children come anyway, and soon John is having an early midlife crisis as his errant youth slips into the background, replaced by the mundane realities of family life.

Spoiler alert: Dogs don't live forever, and if you judge only by the trailers (which include just about all of the film's best comic bits) you may mistakenly think that this movie is appropriate for young children. By the time John and Jennifer and their three perfect kids settle into a beautiful old farmhouse near Philadelphia -- a Thomas Kinkade fantasy home that looks quite beyond the means of most print journalists -- Marley is an old dog. When the bell finally tolls for poor Marley, director David Frankel spares no manipulation to create a death scene worthy of Dickens.

Grogan's column about Marley's death, published in 2004, is sentimental but direct and restrained, and was essentially an apology for having made the dog an object of fun in so many previous columns. Not so the speech Owen Wilson, as Grogan, delivers in the film, which elevates Marley to almost celestial status, so much so that Grogan's kids and wife might wonder where they fall in the hierarchy of his affections.

Dog lovers will probably have a lump in the throat at this moment. But for lovers of cinema, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh, as Oscar Wilde once said of another tragic passing.

There are three fine performances lost in this otherwise middling film. Alan Arkin makes a wonderfully gruff newspaper editor who does just about as much barking as Marley. Jennifer Aniston makes the most of the rather slight figure of Jennifer Grogan, creating a believably human picture of a career woman who gives it up for the kids. And then there's the dog who plays Marley. If he wasn't drugged into a glassy-eyed state for the death scene, then his final weary stare into the great hunting grounds beyond can be ranked as a masterly moment in the annals of canine thespians. If you make it to this point in the film, give yourself a biscuit.

Marley & Me (115 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG for thematic material, some suggestive content and language.