The Call of the Wild (2020)

Buck, a Saint Bernard and Scotch Shepherd cross of immense good cheer, is yanked from a Santa Clara estate and deposited into the Klondike, where he learns the sled, the club, and the satisfactions of the trail. Chris Sanders directs with the thorough professionalism of a man who has spent a career animating creatures and knows exactly where to place the camera when a digital dog is meant to feel sad. The animals are rendered at a fidelity that hovers just outside the uncanny, which is its own kind of achievement. Harrison Ford narrates in a gravelly murmur and appears on screen as John Thornton, a grieving frontiersman who wants nothing to do with gold and everything to do with a harmonica and a dead son he cannot stop mourning.

Omar Sy and Cara Gee play the mail runners Perrault and Francoise with competence and warmth. Michael Horse turns up as a friend of Thornton. These figures exist in the 1890s Yukon as the 1890s Yukon contained them, and the film asks us to notice nothing further about their presence. No thesis is advanced. Karen Gillan's Mercedes is a spoiled sister, which the screenplay treats as a character flaw rather than an occasion for gender critique. The women exist inside the adventure, not in argument with it. Buck's strength is heroic capability, plainly displayed and never interrogated as a statement about bodies of any kind.

Hal the grasping prospector gets his comeuppance, and Thornton pitches the gold into the river, keeping only grocery money. This is frontier moralism of the 1903 vintage, an inherited suspicion of avarice that predates any current enthusiasm for taxing billionaires. The film's only sermon is a soft one: find your true self, run with the wolves, come home to something freer. It preaches gently and to nobody in particular. The result is a warm, old-fashioned family picture, handsomely mounted, culturally becalmed, and content to let a CGI dog carry the argument.