A Dog's Purpose (2017)

A Dog's Purpose arrives with a premise that resists satire: a single canine soul, voiced by Josh Gad, tumbles through several lifetimes in search of meaning. He is Bailey, then Ellie the police dog, then Tino the corgi, then Waffles, then Buddy. Along the way he is euthanized in a pound, dies of heatstroke in a truck, is shot protecting a Chicago officer, and outlives a Landseer named Roxy. Lasse Hallström directs with the steady hand of a man who knows which heartstrings to pull and how hard. Rachel Portman's score handles the rest. It is sentimental the way a greeting card is sentimental. Audiences handed it an A grade from CinemaScore while critics returned a 35 percent approval rating. Both parties are correct.

The cultural inventory here is remarkably bare. Maya, the shy Atlanta student who adopts Tino, is played by Kirby Howell-Baptiste, and her eventual husband Al by Pooch Hall. Neither character carries the weight of identity, and the film makes no argument about it. There is no sermon, no cause, no lesson about the way we live now. The dog's closing wisdom, delivered in voiceover, is that life is about having fun, saving others, finding someone to be with, and not getting upset over the past or the future. That is the whole moral architecture. It sits closer to a fortune cookie than to a manifesto.

A less pleasant footnote lingers. Footage surfaced before release showing a German Shepherd forced into rushing water on set, and PETA called for a boycott. The studio denied wrongdoing, an independent expert concluded the video had been edited to mislead, and the film still grossed 205 million dollars worldwide against a 22 million dollar budget. A sequel followed in 2019. As a document of 2017 cultural anxieties, this one is a blank page, and the page smells faintly of wet dog.