Marley & Me
April 21, 2009
New in the cinema is Marley & Me, a romp through my family life and the central role within it played by our dog, Kinchassa. Owen Wilson does a serviceable impression of me, a bumbling if talented journalist who, having convinced his sweetheart to marry him (against all odds), buys her a dog to stave off the inevitable arrival of children and termination of LIFE AS HE KNOWS IT.
Wife and sweetheart Claire, played by Jennifer Aniston, has her own crisis when she finds herself standing with one foot in the workplace and the other in a pile of soiled nappies. She feels – as does every mother I’ve ever met – as if she’s unable to do her career job or her motherhood job properly, and thus does a half-arsed job of both. After many fraught evenings with babyfood stains on suit jackets and sleepless nights before presentations, she decides to give up on the superwoman ideal. She chucks in her career to become the gorgeous and windswept mother of two boys and a girl, and sexy 40 year-old skinny-dipping wife of Owen Wilson, aka, me. Not, however, before breaking under the realisation that everything that ever defined her as a person has been squashed by an endless pile of dirty laundry, food scraps and excreta; that long-term sleep deprivation turns a person into a shrieking and unreasonable harridan; and that making house can be as satisfying as making money but you have to work on it – it’s a mental thing.
Through all this Marley the Labrador hurtles, chewing, barking and soiling his way through our lives. Our real-life dog, full name Kinchassa the Dog of Essendine, is actually a much milder-mannered Cocker Spaniel who gave up chewing soon after adolescence and has stoically put up with children pulling her ears and sticking toys up her bum throughout her eleven-some years. But she has been no less central to the evolution of the dramatic narrative of the Hanley family than the fictional Marley, and Marley’s extremes of behaviour provide a focus for a story that is dramatic enough for those of us who live it, but so very mediocre and samey to people on the outside looking in.
The other big difference is that Kinchassa the Dog remains alive, while Marley rests in peace under the oak tree in Owen and Jennifer’s backyard. The unspoken question at the end of the film, at least for those of us whose lives scarily mirror those of the protagonists is: what next?
In real life, after Marley died, journalist John Grogan went on to package his columns up into a book that sold 5 million copies and became a Hollywood feature starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. I’m looking forward to that bit. Kinchassa… love you a lot.. but if that cough gets any worse…
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