Review of Marley & Me (2008) by Chads. — 25 Dec 2008

Move over, Marley: You have company. The newspaper industry sleeps with the fishes, too. But in "Marley and Me", the newspaper industry thrives still, an indication that this doggy snuff film is a period piece about the relatively recent past.

There's nary a typewriter in sight; this isn't the era of Howard Hawks' "His Girl Friday", after all, but the computers don't run Windows, which might as well be the dark ages, technology-wise.

A journalist actually had the luxury to mull over the pros and cons of being a reporter, or a columnist. The Internet was still in its infancy, a mere "truck". While the "truck" blossomed into "a series of tubes", Josh Grogan(Owen Wilson) got a dog, got a career, and got a family.

A film about a dog is a recipe for schmaltz, but "Marley and Me" avoids devolving into a cute animal horror show by balancing the good times with the bad times. In one pointed scene, the Labrador Retriever's unruly nature, once seemingly comedic when the dog was a proxy, becomes a point of contention, after Marley is downgraded to pet status, following the birth of the Grogan children.

Another factor that calibrates "Marley and Me" against gratuitous dog-related humor and pathos is the character of Josh's friend, a womanizing reporter whom the columnist envies because he's free.

Josh has not one, but two dogs, shadowing his life. In the film's other key scene, after Josh's family photo is handed back to him, the dog tells the dog-owner that he did good, that nothing has changed.

When the old friends part, the married man looks back at the single man with longing. "Marley and Me" succeeds becuse the dog isn't always the focal point of the story; the film depicts the tension between the road Josh took, and the road not taken, which it then tries to negotiate when the columnist convinces his editor and himself that he's no reporter.

While "Marley and Me" inevitably dramatizes one death, it subtly alludes to another death in the soundtrack's inclusion of a Nirvana cover("Lithium" by Bruce Lash). Like how grunge killed the "hair bands" back in the early-nineties, the computer sitting harmlessly on Josh's desk would someday in the very near future, kill journalism as the characters in the film knew it.