Call of the Wild is so different than the book that it’s almost a new story entirely, but this is unavoidable. It doesn’t depict dogs starving, being shot, drowning, killing men*, or even killing each other. It shows a dog hit with the club once. Otherwise the extended beating and whipping necessary to the story is merely implied or described in voice over. It’s been meticulously scrubbed of any ethnic or racial controversies by re-writing and casting. The only slurs that remain, rather than being racial, are simply a tragic characteristic of Harrison Ford’s inebriated speech.
Ford delivers a stunning performance as a sad drunk living in constant fear of an imaginary dog knocking over his glass or stealing his whiskey bottle. It’s almost as if he’s not even acting. I’m not sure he realized that a CGI dog couldn’t really stop him from drinking or that he knew they were filming when he hid his bottle in the rafters of the cabin. I have a theory that the cabin is just where Harrison Ford lives, and a film crew showed up one day to interview him. Realizing they had hours of him drunkenly planning a quest to find gold with his invisible dog, they adroitly constructed the rest of the movie around this footage.
I got some strange looks as we were leaving the theater and I was explaining to my daughters that “the male character should have removed his clothes, then taken off the woman’s clothes and held her directly against his body.” I felt impelled to deliver this impromptu cold water safety lecture due to a somewhat irresponsible scene. After a character experiences near drowning in ice cold water, it cuts away from her situation entirely while the male character is foolishly concerned only with one of his dogs. The woman would have been at immediate risk of death in the remote wilderness with no readily available shelter or heat source.
That man had a moral responsibility to let his dog drown while he removed the unconscious woman’s clothes and held her against his naked body. His failure to do so sends the wrong message to children. Since being submerged in cold water is dangerous, being removed from cold water must be a complete solution. This dangerously stupid and oversimplified “logic” makes sense if you see it enough times. Why couldn’t Harrison Ford stumble onto this scene and once again shove a hypothermic person into the freshly killed carcass of a large animal, perhaps a seal? I have to take off a few points for missing the obvious opportunity for a good disemboweling. Isn’t The Empire Strikes Back a cherished family adventure featuring a classic and beloved graphic disembowelment scene? Search your feelings. You know it to be true.
Call of the Wild has many positive elements and it is apparent that talented people worked hard on it. It’s not lazy. We get to see excellent set design, creative shot composition, great lighting, some good acting, appropriate and understated music, and cowboy guns (lever action rifles, single action revolvers).
It suffers from bad editing in the beginning, some terrible acting, and one unforgivably terrible shot at the climax of the action. The antagonist’s motivation was strange and unclear because the script condensed too many characters from the book. My 8 year old daughter, who knows the book, was confused and asked me about this afterwards. There was one overly cartoonish and childish action sequence. There was a better and I think obvious way the antagonist could have been defeated. It was very off-putting that the man who was cruelest to the dogs appeared to be distinctly Appalachian. Where did he come from? The film has a mysterious and unfortunate dearth of French Canadian dog abusers.
I acknowledge they could never depict the ending from the book in any movie but I wanted to see Buck become not just hardened and dangerous, but legendarily so. In the book, generations of people won’t venture to the place where Buck took his revenge and they consider him to be a demon. We see nothing like this in the movie.
I dreaded this movie because of the terrible CGI dog in the trailer. But after seeing it I’m going to partially defend the CGI dog. Yes, it’s far too Scooby-Doo at times. I think the concept was to have Buck be silly at first, then become hard by the end, and they could do this much more effectively with a CGI dog. It is a smart idea and it generally worked. They just slightly mis-calibrated. I also think they might have planned to show much more violence towards the dogs, and again the computer generated dog makes mores sense. The quality should have been better, but it was not nearly as bad as I had feared. In contrast to Buck, the white she-wolf was done well. I appreciated the realistic depiction of this white bitch, an area where many family movies fail.
See it with your kids if they like dogs. Otherwise watch Togo, a much better sled dog movie, starring Willem Dafoe and real, living dogs. I also thought it was odd that Willem Dafoe didn’t remove his clothes in several scenes of Togo. Not because the scene called for it, but just because it’s Willem Dafoe. When you hire Willem Dafoe, do you need to pay him more or pay him less to remain fully clothed? It’s quite difficult to say.
Call of the Wild is decent family movie, but like almost all “family” productions, it is at war with itself because it’s made for at least 3 different target audiences. You can always tell these movies were stepped on and can just feel the meetings while watching them. This one is better than most and it had much potential. If only the suits would have unleashed their creative team and allowed them to run wild rather than forcing them to do the heavy pulling for the marketing department.
I would have liked to see this much effort dedicated to an R rated, 2.5 hour Call of the Wild that is more true to the source material. The theater we went to was pretty full for a sunny Sunday afternoon, and there were only one or two children other than mine there. I think there is a good market for hours of realistic violence towards innocent dogs followed by a triumphant, one-sided slaughter of First Nations people. But maybe it’s good that people like me cannot be put in charge of such decisions. Perhaps the bean counters and focus groups got it right once again and Scooby-Doo on Ice is the best of all possible worlds.
No comments:
Post a Comment