Marley & Me
(David Frankel):
Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston, Eric Dane,
Alan Arkin, Kathleen Turner.
Running time: 110 minutes (PG)

Settling for less is more. That’s the message of Marley & Me, the new comedy-of-sorts and part-time tearjerker starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. Early on, a conversation takes place between two old buddies. There’s Owen Wilson’s John Grogan, a retired stoner-turned-journalist who married Jennifer (Jennifer Aniston), moved to Miami and is taking his first baby steps, in his late 20s, into adulthood. And there’s Sebastian (Eric Dane), a ladykiller who remains resolutely single. John worries about his wife’s ticking biological clock and her plans for the spare bedroom. But Sebastian has the right kind of advice. “Get her a dog,” he says. “You’ve got a kid, you’re a dad – you’re not you anymore. You get a dog, you’re the master.”
Marley & Me spends the rest of the time, in an insipid, mildly comic fashion, turning this advice on its head. John becomes a dad and the film goes to Defcon Four life-lessons alert. Meanwhile, Marley, the neurotic puppy, grows into a 100lb psychotic nightmare. He really is an arsehole. He is the kind of dog ordinary folk would happily, and I say happily, have put down. But John abides.
The film is an adaptation from John Grogan’s bestselling book and is directed with the anodyne hand of David Frankel, the director of The Devil Wears Prada. He gives us a film of two halves. The first is comic caper, where Marley earns his bad credentials. The soundtrack blares Ben Folds’ ‘We’re Rocking the Suburbs’ and John settles into married life. Marley, meanwhile, is eating the suburbs. He seems to possess the ability to chew through steel and concrete. He doesn’t do sit or rollover. He just tears the house apart, rips arms out of sockets and blinds off windows, barks the infant awake and knocks over the toddler.
John takes Marley to Ms Kornblut, an unforgiving dog trainer played by Kathleen Turner. Turner, who spent the 1980s growling at Michael Douglas, has now been reduced to growling at dogs. She no longer looks the svelte siren and has even lost some of that bark. Marley hasn’t a clue who she is. Clearly he has not watched The War of the Roses. We know this by the way he hungrily mounts her leg.
Dog slapstick gets tiring, although sometimes it breaks a smile on your face. Frankel offers us the clichéd image of a dog with his tongue flapping out a car window. Only for Marley then to climb out the window while the car drives down the freeway.
Owen Wilson, who can’t be rushed into anything, spends the film as a perennially chasing blur. He sprinkles the movie with that magnetic laconic charm. His eyes twinkle like he’s in on a joke. His lazy Texan drawl suggests a stoner who has just awoken to find himself starring in a movie. Perhaps that explains why he always seems to be on the back foot. This plays nicely here into a character who is busy catching up with his wife’s expectations.
In many respects, he reminds you of Seth Rogen’s Ben from Knocked Up, although he’s not quite as hopeless or, for that matter, as dramatically interesting. Indeed, Marley & Me plays like the dull younger brother of Knocked Up, and follows Judd Apatow’s template: it charms us with comedy and then, when it knows it has us, steers us into raw, real life.
Even Aniston, who up to this point showed little sign of interior life, begins to stir. The film comes awake. The couple has trouble conceiving. They experience a miscarriage. After child number two, Jennifer gets post-natal depression. John sits in his car in the driveway after work and wonders where it all went wrong.
By the end of it, John, as predicted by Sebastian, is not himself any more. He’s a more spiritual man. This is painfully demonstrated in a scene years later, where John bumps into Sebastian and the best friends no longer have anything to say. John evidently has been brainwashed by his wife, dog and three kids, while big-shot New York Times journalist Sebastian is a walking vacuum. (This scene will have singles ripping out the seats in front of them and smug marrieds beaming I-told-you-so’s.)
Like Knocked Up, Marley & Me wants to take the life lived ordinary and eulogise it. But while Apatow’s film injected a savage humour into the piquancy of real life, David Frankel churns through this material like he was making vanilla ice cream. And it’s lazy – when Marley grows old (by now we’re supposed to love him), Frankel presses the big red button marked ‘tearjerker’. It’s all terribly nice, by which I mean terribly bland. Settling for less is still settling for less.