What's not to like about Marley and Me?

Chuck, EunJee and I went to see "Marley and Me" on the Friday after Christmas. I didn't anticipate how packed the theater would be- we ended up sitting in the first row, basically watching the movie rise above us while lying on our backs. (It would have been a cool way to watch the opening scene of Star Wars.) Chuck and I laughed, and we cried, (although to be honest, we cry at the vacuum commercials that have all those cute yellow lab puppies. We're big sentimental sissies when it comes to puppies and babies and sunsets.) The rest of the audience- with the exception of EunJee, who never cries at movies- laughed and wept right along with us.

When I did an Internet search for clips and comments for this entry, I found more bad reviews than good. Washington Post staff writer Phillip Kennicott says "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. " (Read More) Rotten Tomatoes gave Marley and Me only 55% on the Tomatometer

I was surprised find how many people didn't like the book Marley and Me, and were planning not to see the movie. Most of the Anti-Marley crowd are animal experts like Gina Spadafori. Writing on Pet Connection, Spadafori says "Of course, I’m not the only person with a negative reaction to the whole Marley thing. Most everyone I know who has any kind of expertise in training or behavior also found the book hard to stomach." (Read More) Spadafori feels, and I am sure she is correct "There was nothing wrong with Marley that some consistent, well-informed environmental changes, training and exercise couldn’t have fixed. “Bad” dogs just aren’t funny to me."

I read the book some years ago, in what was to be the last year of my yellow lab, Ender's, life. Ender was a challenging dog, although his behavior was not as flamboyant as Marley's. As I read, I laughed and I cried, and I saw my own dog reflected on the pages, good and bad.

Even while reading, I recognized that Grogan was describing Bad Owner problems more than Bad Dog problems. But here's the thing- The man is a story teller. In story telling, emphasis is everything. To entertain the audience, story tellers pick and choose from the minutia of the day. When reading about Marley's antics, I assumed that, behind and beyond the entertaining story, the Grogans were doing the best they could to control Marley's behaviors, just as my family had done the best we could to manage Ender's behaviors. The stories I tell about Ender don't include the boring bits, the repetitive sit-stay's and downs, or the ways we altered our behaviors to accommodate what we could not change in him. And they certainly don't include the things I learned too late, the things I didn't know and so couldn't use to help Ender be a better dog and me a better owner.

But beyond that, what I connected with in Marley and Me, both the book and the movie, was the commitment to the dog- the fact that he was a member of the family and not disposable. Yeah, we alter the unsocial behavior of children by teaching them how to behave rather than sending them to the pound. (Some of us do, and some of us strive to do so with varying degrees of success.) Perhaps in those entertaining stories, Grogan should have pointed out that it is the responsibility of an owner to do the same for family animals. But that would have been a different book. Not a better book, nor a worse one, just a different one.

You can read some of the Pro-Marley crowd's comments on John Grogan's blog- the latest entry is about the Grogan family's new puppy Woodson, who portrayed one of the Marley puppies in the movie. (Read More),

Here you will see a short clip of John Grogan talking about Marley and Me


And finally, here's a clip of Director David Frankel, Owen Wilson and Jennifer Anniston talking about the movie:


By the way, according to this article in the LA Times, the American Humane Association has a campaign in place to help ensure that movie-goers don't purchase lab puppies on impulse, as happened after the 101 Dalmatians and Beethoven movies came out.