Dogs are the perfect melodramatic characters. Whether in books, movies, online gifs, or those terrible Sarah McLaughlin commercials, the ultimate domesticated animal tugs at heartstrings like no other. Dogs tend to be more noticeably expressive compared to other pets. A snake is not going to give you a reaction. A cat is generally indifferent about most things you do unless it involves food or belly-rubs. Movies have used dogs as anthropomorphic ciphers of humans for decades from the lowest-brow straight-to-DVD cinema to the highest brow offerings at Cannes, a festival which awards the best dog performance at the festival with a Palme d’Og award (get it?).
More often than not, dog-centric stories are utilized as a sappy family affair that recycles the same clichés over and over in different breeds. While some standout, like Homeward Bound or Air Bud, most disappear into the mist along with a pile of other trash. So when The Art of Racing in the Rain came out, the odds were going to be against it. Especially from me, a cat-person, who does not go to see “family-oriented dramas” unless, well, I’m assigned to review them like here.
Saved by the Book
Adapted from a best-selling novel by Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain begins with a sick dog named Enzo looking back on his own life and his loyalty to his owner Denny. The movie tells us straight up that it’s made from the type of stuff that is designed in a lab to draw tears and whimpers. Sunlit and featuring impeccably beautiful and fairly wealthy characters, I expected the movie to stem into PureFlix territory and become an insufferable preachy mess.
Luckily for this movie, the source material by Stein is very well written and combined with a brilliant canine voice-over performance by Kevin Costner provided an absolutely solid foundation to the central dog character, who in his own right puts on a show. These elements have to work, because the rest of the movie is comprised of actors simply going through the motions and human dialogue that is stilted, melodramatic, and portraying the same shameless plea for an emotional connection that Milo Ventimiglia’s main gig, This is Us, employs.
The Tao of Dog
Ventimiglia is well-cast as up-and-coming race car driver Denny Swift and isn’t expected to display a lot of range or function beyond what he already does on an episodic basis in This is Us. The movie’s script works in a similar spectrum of melodramatic plotting to that TV show. Someone gets cancer, someone dies, marital problem ensues, there’s a court case, children are involved, family vs. career choices must be made. All of these serve as conflicts that Denny must deal with but which are navigated mentally via Enzo. While the film’s melodrama and use of an animal as the emotional linchpin can be compared to Spielberg’s War Horse, it does its philosophizing literally through the thoughts and actions of the animal itself. This can be both a boon to the film and a point of emotional weight.
Enzo’s ability to reason and react is, of course, exaggerated from real life. While dogs do remain expressive, the scientific study of their actual mental capacity still maintains they can’t think or process anywhere near as well as humans. To counter this, Garth Stein builds the foundation of his book on the old Mongolian traditional belief system that in the cycle of rebirths, the dog was the last stage of reincarnation before the soul becomes one of a man. This is something Enzo watches on TV. The book and the film thereby postulate Enzo’s ability to form a human-like thought process via flashbacks to his life is because he is consistently in the process of mentally and spiritually preparing for his ultimate reincarnation.
The Art of Racing in the Rain: In Conclusion
Stein’s words comprise the majority of the dialogue in the film and are the major source of fun and emotional resonance. Director Simon Curtis, who’s oeuvre has included a litany of mid-tier drama films like My Week with Marilyn and Goodbye, Christopher Robin is just the right director to process the sappy emotional material at hand into a risk-averse and charming film.
Watch The Art of Racing in the Rain
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