Film Review: ‘A Dog’s Purpose’
“A Dog’s Purpose” is the type of movie that lives or dies entirely on its audience’s goodwill. With it, the Lasse Hallström film could serve as a cinematic warm blanket in this moment of national fractiousness and fear: full of adorable pooches, gentle breezes of Hallmark card philosophy, and nonpartisan rah-rah Americana. Without it, it veers dangerously close to kitsch, shamelessly exploiting one of the most reliable tear-jerking devices in fiction – the death of a dog – over and over again. Given the undesirable press that has surrounded this film over the past week, goodwill may be in short supply.
The pre-release discussion of “A Dog’s Purpose” has largely revolved around a brief, disturbing video clip, provided to TMZ by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in which a German Shepherd performing on the film appears to be forced unwillingly into a raging water tank. The video stirred outrage and calls for a boycott, prompting Hallström and screenwriter W. Bruce Cameron (on whose novel the film is based) to issue statements in the film’s defense, as well as a thorough response from producer Gavin Polone, who acknowledged that the incident never should have happened, while also claiming that full, unedited footage from that shooting day reveals a much less objectionable picture.
Questions about this particular film’s on-set safety standards – not to mention the further-reaching debates about the ethics of using animals in film – are far beyond the purview of this review, but it’s hard to deny that the scandal colors the viewing of what is otherwise a guilelessly mawkish celebration of the canine will to power.
Predicated on an unexplained notion of doggy reincarnation, “A Dog’s Purpose” first introduces us to an eager stray puppy, soothingly voiced by Josh Gad, who narrates his confused introduction to the planet sometime in the early 1960s. Before…
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