Screenhead

You know, when I first heard about Marley and Me, I was ready to put on the barbed wire boxing gloves and go hunt up some hapless Hollywood slimeball and teach him the meaning of the term “shameless cash grab”.  How desperate was Hollywood, I thought, reading about Marley for the first time, that they were going to put up two hours of cute dog?

And then, when it emerged on video mere days ago, I grit my teeth and held on tight, knowing that I’d have to talk about this.  And the miserable bastards…they made it GOOD.

Marley and Me is the story of a pair of recently married writers from southwest lower Michigan (an area I know all too well–I went to college at Western Michigan University, and the Kalamazoo Gazette was one of John Grogan’s first jobs), John and Jenny Grogan.  John wants to delay Jenny’s “master plan”, a plan that involves babies and roof replacements and who all knows what else, so at the advice of his ladies man friend Sebastian, John gets a dog for Jenny.  And this is where their new life with Marley begins.

Marley, meanwhile, is a comic figure in his own right, almost an elemental force of nature that tears things apart and chews things and EATS things outright.  He is a huge dog, fully a hundred pounds of yellow Labrador retriever, and probably possessing some kind of strange mental disorder.

From there, we go forward with the life of the family, warts and all.  Perhaps the worst part about Marley and Me is that it really IS just two hours of cute dog…but what they did, the insidious thing that they did, was that they inserted those two hours of cute dog into the lives of a young couple.  And they made that insertion so seamless and yet so catastrophic that it was both hilarious and poignant all at the same time.  I won’t dare spoiler by telling you all the things the dog got into, all the trouble, all the mayhem, all the surprises…but there are so very many of them that it’s sheer lunacy.

He is, quite possibly, the world’s worst dog.  But perhaps because of this—or maybe just in spite of this, he becomes a beloved family pet.  Time makes this kind of thing possible, I guess; after all…it takes something to take a dog that once ate an entire answering machine and turn him into a beloved family pet.  That kind of thing doesn’t just happen.

I hate using words like poignant, by the way—they’re so badly overused by second-rate columnists who want to add drama to their work—but sometimes, “tender” and “heartrending” just don’t cut it.  It’s the reality of the whole thing, the way they show everything….how this dog is part of an overall mosaic of a life that lasts nearly fifteen years.  Marley is proven to be nothing so much as a trooper: a fearsome watchdog, a loyal friend, a happy, vibrant dog that makes a lot of messes and does a lot of damage, but never out of any malicious intent.  He’s just a dog that doesn’t know his own strength…and he lived, every day.

They even got me a little teary-eyed toward the end there—and it’s scarcely spoilering to tell you there WILL be an end.  It’s not so much about the end, though, as what came before it.  It’s cheesy melodrama of the worst possible type, but it will be effective.  This is a low blow.  We’re having our emotions manipulated.  Our heartstrings are being plucked like a Rachmaninoff concerto.  Say what you will, because it’s all true.  It’s all true, but no less effective.

It is, for all intents and purposes, a life standing before us–the life of a dog, for what it’s worth.  It shouldn’t have had that kind of significance, and yet, it did.

Despite itself…or maybe BECAUSE of itself…it did.

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