The Art of Racing in the Rain (3/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 107 minutes.

PG.

How many more movies about dogs will we have to see? This is the third this year. The other two (A Dog's Journey and A Dog's Way Home) were about dogs who thought and acted like dogs. This one thinks and reasons like it got a PhD from an Ivy League school.

This emotionally manipulative film is directed by Simon Curtis, with a screenplay by Mark Bomback, based on a novel (undoubtedly emotionally manipulated as well, but I haven’t read it…and won’t) by Garth Stein. The dog, Enzo (voiced by Kevin Costner) is owned from a puppy by Denny Swift (Milo Ventimiglia), a fledgling race car driver. Enzo contemplates things beyond “bacon, bacon, bacon!” and looking at his master and thinking, “You are God!”

No, this dog reasons like Aristotle and plans and cogitates on things beyond the ken of most normal humans. One of his thoughts is that his life can’t end with death and he’s convinced he will be reincarnated as a human and when he is he wants to be able to remember everything happening to him as a dog. Given his high IQ intellect, it’s odd that it never occurs to him that if reincarnation is true, then he had a different life before this but he doesn’t remember anything about that.

Denny falls in love with Eve (Amanda Seyfried) and they marry and have a daughter, Zoe (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). Eve’s upper class parents, Maxwell (Martin Donovan) and Trish (Kathy Baker), are less than enthusiastic about Eve’s choice of a husband, and don’t hide their feelings.

Thus proceeds the richly clichéd story with its predictable problems and its hackneyed ending. There have been dog movies that were entertaining. But neither Lassie nor Rin Tin Tin (“Rinty”) told their stories themselves. They were just dogs with heroic acts. Not even Marley (Marley and Me, 2008) had human thoughts that were communicated to the audience. I don’t remember Jack London’s protagonist dog, Buck, in “Call of the Wild” as having human thoughts, but it’s been decades since I read it; human characteristics, maybe. This new trend that has dogs thinking and reasoning like humans is a great leap backwards and renders a movie like this more of a Disney-like live action cartoon without the voice of Ducky Nash.

The acting is good by everyone as is the cinematography. Let’s hope, though, that this is the last dog movie for the foreseeable future, although my female assistant loved it. However, I think it unlikely to charm the male of the species.