My Dog Skip

"'My Dog Skip'?" you college students angrily ask. "There had better be some justification for this review! It's taking away valuable Diamondback space that could be used for dot-com recruiting ads!" However, "My Dog"'s pedigree would lead you to expect something special, at least for the kiddie-film genre. For one thing, it stars the ever-likable Frankie Muniz as the title dog owner, with Kevin Bacon and Diane Lane as his parents. For another thing, it is based on a memoir by Willie Morris, onetime Rhodes scholar and Harper's editor, so you might hope to derive vague clues about how to achieve similar success from the narrative. Unfortunately, the only thing you can deduce from this movie is that Morris went off to Oxford after his senior year of high school primarily to escape the suffocating clichés surrounding him. "My Dog Skip" is a fairly well-acted film, but its story's staggering predictability makes it a complete non-starter.

You would think that, by now, Hollywood would have already achieved the maximum possible predictability in a film. However, you haven't seen this film, either. This coming-of-age story set in the South during the Second World War contains, in no particular order: a revered white athlete, whom the main character idolizes, going off to war to become a man; a bunch of mean kids who won't let the main character alone because of his predilection to read; a little blond girl who the main character wishes he could talk to, and who eventually comes to respect his ability to read; a little colored boy who teaches the main character not to be racist anymore; a distant father who alternately overprotects and criticizes the main character; a mother who opposes the father in her independent free thinking; and of course the title dog, a paragon of canine virtues who is never shown picking an unfortunate place to defecate or ruining valuable upholstered furniture. There are also the dare to stay in the graveyard overnight, and the baseball scenes, and the main character's discovery that hunting is wrong. You can see precisely where every plot element is going from the very second it is introduced.

This problematic plot thereby undermines the efforts of those drafted to act it, some of whom do quite well indeed. Chief among these is Muniz, who almost makes this retread plot believable with his understated conviction. Muniz, unlike everyone else involved in the film, resists the impulse to make the plot's numerous messages for the kiddies as obvious as neon subtitles. He is never less than watchable, and his Southern accent isn't even really that bad. Bacon's Southern accent is worse, but he makes up for it by not acting nearly as creepy as he seems accustomed to acting on screen. He comes out a believable father figure, not nearly as shallow a character as the intrusive, vapid voice-overs would have us believe. Sometimes, with these two actors on screen together, the film achieves a pleasing rhythm and tone.

The rest of the time, though, it's just a race to pack cliché after cliché in until this film reaches its much-delayed finish line. (When it does, it whomps us with the biggest cliché anyone could dream up, one which had the adults in the preview audience laughing at the sheer audacity the filmmakers showed in trotting it out one more time.) One of childhood's cardinal qualities, and certainly its most reassuring, is that no one knows how it will turn out until it ends. "My Dog Skip" forgets this fact completely, and thus it feels like no one's childhood at all.

THE PROBLEMS OF KNOWLEDGE

Wonder what my editors will think of this lead. It gets harder and harder to establish exigence ever since I figured out what that word meant. [They printed it without editing it. They needed text to fill space. What can I tell you?]

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