January 12, 2000

FILM REVIEW

`My Dog Skip': Fetch,Boy! Fetch the Wisdom of the Ages!

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By A. O. SCOTT

'll say this much for Skip, the antic terrier whose adventures are the subject of Jay Russell's new movie: He does not use a computer-animated mouth to recite cute catch phrases. He is not affiliated with a video game, a line of action figures or a fast-food marketing campaign. He is not a Pokémon. This may be enough to recommend him to parents recovering from a holiday season spent with Buzz Lightyear, Pikachu and the chirpy, high-tech Stuart Little.

	Jeanne Louise Buillard/Warner Brothers Pictures
	Puppy love: Caitlin Wachs and Frankie Muniz in Jay Russell's film "My Dog Skip."

Just as Skip is an old-fashioned, flesh-and-blood dog, "My Dog Skip" is a resolutely old-fashioned movie: a relaxed, modest evocation of the mythology of small-town mid-20th-century American childhood, with its lazy summers, its front porches and picket fences, and its fat-tired, chromed-plated bicycles. The mementos we see during the opening credits are emblems of childhood in an earlier, simpler time: a slingshot, a jar of marbles, a battered copy of "Huckleberry Finn," a football signed by Sammy Baugh. See, parents will say to their children, this is how it was before television, before Ritalin, before Doom. There were no play dates back then, just play.

"My Dog Skip," set in a small Mississippi town during World War II, is shot through with nostalgia for the lost innocence of childhood and full of rumination (thanks to Harry Connick Jr.'s raspy-throated voice-over) about the deep wisdom a dog can impart to a boy. Since children seldom regard themselves as innocent, and since they are incapable of nostalgia for a time of life they have yet to see slip away, they may find themselves mystified and a little bored by a movie designed to leave their adult companions misty-eyed.

But the younger ones will at least be amused by Skip's charming pet tricks: he drives the family car, cadges bologna from the butcher and tries to enlist in the Army.

Older children, meanwhile, will sympathize with Skip's young master as he grapples with the irrationality of adults, the cruelty of his peers and the advent of puppy love in both its literal and its metaphorical incarnations. Some, of course, may wonder just what was so innocent about a time of strict racial segregation, when grown black men addressed 9-year-old boys -- and their dogs -- as "sir."

"My Dog Skip" is based on Willie Morris's slender anecdotal memoir of his carefree youth in Yazoo City, "an unhurried, isolated place" on the edge of the Mississippi Delta. Morris's wry, inconsequential vignettes -- about spending the night in the town cemetery, about Skip's performances in backyard football games -- have been threaded together into a narrative bustling with complication and laden with emotion, and a great deal has been invented outright.

Willie has been given a next-door neighbor named Dink Jenkins (Luke Wilson), who leaves for the service a hometown sports hero and returns home in disgrace, dogged by rumors of overseas cowardice. Willie's father, Jack (Kevin Bacon), himself an embittered war veteran -- he lost a leg in the Spanish Civil War -- is at once remote and overprotective. When Willie receives Skip as a birthday present, Jack threatens, for reasons that are not terribly clear or convincing, to send the poor pooch away. But Skip's frolicsome good nature is enough to melt the stoniest heart, and Jack and Willie learn important lessons about love, loyalty, and the bonds between father and son.

None of this is in the book, but Mr. Russell and his screenwriter, Gail Gilchriest, clearly felt they needed more drama than Morris's leisurely narrative could supply.

Mr. Bacon, stoically disregarding the wild implausibility of his character's past, delivers a beautifully understated performance, as does Diane Lane, who plays Willie's mother, Ellen. As Willie, the squinchy-faced Frankie Muniz -- who may become the first child media sensation of the new century, thanks to his starring role in the new Fox television series "Malcolm in the Middle" -- is nearly as irresistible as Skip, who is impersonated by no fewer than six eminently capable Jack Russell terriers. Caitlin Wachs is witty and appealing as Rivers Applewhite, a sympathetic Becky Thatcher to Willie's tame Tom Sawyer.

These performances, and the lovely Mississippi locations (the film was shot in picturesque Canton, just up the road from Yazoo City, which has apparently grown too big and too modern to pass for its old self) help to make the film's relentless sentimentality more bearable than it otherwise might have been.

"My Dog Skip" works best when it sticks with the gentle humor and pathos of its literary source. But the filmmakers are prone, as the adult Morris rarely was, to moralizing overstatement. Everything that happens to young Willie becomes a rite of passage, and the stages of his life are measured in absurdly precise increments: his adult voice informs us when he completes the transit from child to boy, and then from boy to young man. (Morris's later life included a scholarship to Oxford University, the editorship of Harper's magazine and a distinguished career as writer, raconteur and colorful local character.)

At one point the voice-over, needlessly embellishing Morris's prose, tells us that Skip seemed "possessed of a wisdom as old as time itself." This seems more than a bit hyperbolic, given that it describes a creature whose greatest ambition is to reach the toilet bowl and who chases his tail when commanded to play dead.

   "My Dog Skip" is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It depicts, but does not condone, several acts of cruelty to animals.

MY DOG SKIP

Directed by Jay Russell; written by Gail Gilchriest, based on the book by Willie Morris; director of photography, James L. Carter; edited by Harvey Rosenstock and Gary Winter; music by William Ross; production designer, David J. Bomba; produced by Broderick Johnson, Andrew Kosove, Mr. Russell and Marty Ewing; released by Warner Brothers. Running time: 95 minutes. This film is rated PG.

Frankie Muniz (Willie Morris), Diane Lane (Ellen Morris), Luke Wilson (Dink Jenkins), Kevin Bacon (Jack Morris), Caitlin Wachs (Rivers Applewhite), Bradley Coryell (Big Boy Wilkinson), Daylan Honeycutt (Henjie Henick),Cody Linley (Spit McGee) and Harry Connick Jr. (Narrator).