A Dog's Way Home (2019)

A Dog's Way Home concerns Bella, a pitbull mix voiced by Bryce Dallas Howard, who is separated from her owner Lucas and spends two and a half years walking four hundred miles from New Mexico back to Denver. Along the way she befriends an orphaned cougar cub, survives coyotes, digs a man out of an avalanche, and watches a homeless veteran die while she is tethered to him. The film is a family adventure drama, and it is content to remain one.

The picture's most substantive social gesture is its treatment of Denver's pitbull ban. Bella is confiscated, threatened with euthanasia, and finally saved by a jurisdictional technicality involving federal property. The film clearly wants us to feel that breed legislation is unjust. It never says so about people. Alexandra Shipp, Edward James Olmos, and Wes Studi appear in supporting roles, and each is defined by function: the friend, the dying veteran, the police captain. Their presence is unremarked upon, which is to say the film casts diversely and then declines to think about it.

Brian Markinson's developer wants to demolish the abandoned house, which supplies a faint whiff of anti-development sentiment, though the film has no interest in wealth as a subject. The moral instruction arrives through a dying dog's-eye view of human kindness, soft enough that audiences gave it an A minus. It is a competent, moist, entirely conventional animal picture. The cultural weather around it barely registers. A cat raises a pitbull, a cougar saves her, and nobody learns anything about power.