Dog Used as Metaphor for Happiness in 'Marley & Me'

When filmmaker David Frankel showed a rough cut of his film "The Devil Wears Prada" to his boss, Fox 2000 Pictures president Elizabeth Gabler, she was so pleased that she handed him a copy of another best-selling book to adapt into a movie: "Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog."

Written by newspaper columnist John Grogan, the 2005 book recounted his and his wife Jenny's experiences with their Labrador retriever Marley, who grew from an adorable, precocious puppy into a hyperactive, relentlessly mischievous dog who discovered altogether new strains of canine bad behavior.

Although Frankel liked the book, he politely declined the opportunity to turn it into a film. "It's a lovely book, and it made me cry, but I just didn't see the movie," Frankel said earlier this month over a glass of wine at a cafe just a few blocks from his home in Coconut Grove, Fla. "There's no conflict in it. It's charming chapter by chapter, but it's just an account of these people's lives. I didn't see how the pieces fit together to make a movie."

A few months later, Gabler again pitched the project to Frankel, this time giving him an actual script, by screenwriter Scott Frank ("Get Shorty," "Out of Sight"). And this time, Frankel immediately saw a movie, which wound up being filmed mostly in South Florida.

"What Scott wrote into the script was a sense of longing," Frankel said. "He didn't make it an episodic, literal translation of the book. He made it the story of a marriage -- the whole rollercoaster ride this couple goes through over a period of 14 years. I felt like it was as close to an autobiographical film as I could possibly make, because it's about a happily married writer who lives in South Florida with his dog, and I'm happily married, living in Miami, writing some of the time, and I have five dogs."

Unlike Marley, Frankel's dogs are all strays. Much like Marley, they are all "crazy," he says. "You come to my house, and you'll find chairs with holes six inches deep. There are no bedspreads in my home that have not been chewed up."

More important, though, the 49-year-old Frankel, who has two children, connected with something deeper in Frank's script: The restlessness felt by John (played by Owen Wilson) who, despite his love for his wife Jennifer (Jennifer Aniston) and their three kids and his job as a successful newspaper columnist, still yearns for that archetypal, elusive "something "more."

"That's what I wanted the movie to capture, and that's why the dog is such a beautiful metaphor for happiness," Frankel said. "Dogs don't look forward, and they don't look back. They are all about 'How can I be happy in this very moment?' People often forget to do that. My wife called it the most wistful movie she's ever seen."

Less easy was wrangling the 22 dogs it took to play Marley from puppydom to age 14. The bulk of Marley's scenes as a young adult, which take up two-thirds of the movie, were played by Clyde, a Labrador that Frankel says was "trained" to be rambunctious.

"The trainers could get him to do whatever we needed, but he's never been taught not to jump up on people or chew whatever he wants to chew," Frankel said. "Basically, he's never been told 'No.' He's crazily energetic, and Grogan testified he's the spitting image of the real Marley. The trick was that the actors "had" to be ready to go on take one, because Clyde was always was brilliant on the first take. But he would get easily bored after that."

Many of the other dogs that played Marley were cast for their ability to do one specific trick, like howling at the window or circling around in the water. One older dog portrayed Marley as a senior. Even though the real-life Marley's health deteriorated over the span of a couple of years, Frankel condensed the dog's aging to a couple of short moments in the film.

"This is a movie about a man who is now middle-aged and acknowledging - not confronting, but acknowledging - his own mortality. We all have to deal with the end of things. Hopefully the movie provides you with a lot of space to project elements of your own life into it. In that sense, the spareness of the story - the simplicity of it - is beautiful.

[Source: STLToday.com]