The Art of Racing in the Rain
Directed by: Simon Curtis
Written by: Mark Bomback - Based on the novel by Garth Stein
Starring: Milo Ventimiglia, Amanda Seyfried, Martin Donovan, Kathy Baker, Gary Cole, Ryan Kiera-Armstrong, Andres Joseph, McKinley Belcher III, Lily Dodsworth-Evans
Comedy/Drama - 109 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 5 Aug 2019
Written by: Mark Bomback - Based on the novel by Garth Stein
Starring: Milo Ventimiglia, Amanda Seyfried, Martin Donovan, Kathy Baker, Gary Cole, Ryan Kiera-Armstrong, Andres Joseph, McKinley Belcher III, Lily Dodsworth-Evans
Comedy/Drama - 109 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 5 Aug 2019
For some reason, we treat movies which deliberately try and make the audience cry differently than movies which aim for laughs or scares. They are looked down upon and mocked. “Oh, that’s just a tearjerker,” you may hear. Why the difference? Why is it cinematically acceptable to chase chuckles and screams rather than tears? I am as guilty as everybody else in slighting soupy melodramas, but in the name of equality, we ought to judge the films on their merits rather than their genre. Therefore, The Art of Racing in the Rain fails not because it tries its hardest to turn on the waterworks, which it will for a large portion of the theater, but because its methods are so overt and land with all the subtlety of an anvil on top of someone’s head. No stranger to shaping narrative arcs to break audiences emotionally in two, director Simon Curtis adapts a runaway New York Times best-seller into a This Is Us episode.
Garth Stein’s 2008 novel spent 156 weeks on the best-seller list. Readers adored how a philosopher/poet canine studied his humans and watched their lives rise and fall through his all-knowing eyes and, more importantly, inner monologue. Voiced by Kevin Costner (McFarland, USA), Enzo the dog speaks to us in polysyllabic soliloquies and ponders his existence through what he learned watching a documentary on Mongolia. If all dogs are as intelligent as Enzo, they must consider us complete fools for how we baby talk down to them. Enzo’s main human is Denny Swift (Milo Ventimiglia, Creed II), a journeyman racecar driver who picked up a Golden Retriever on impulse one day. Enzo, in his grizzled and omniscient tone says, “Call it fate. Call it luck. All I know is I was destined to be his dog.”
Garth Stein’s 2008 novel spent 156 weeks on the best-seller list. Readers adored how a philosopher/poet canine studied his humans and watched their lives rise and fall through his all-knowing eyes and, more importantly, inner monologue. Voiced by Kevin Costner (McFarland, USA), Enzo the dog speaks to us in polysyllabic soliloquies and ponders his existence through what he learned watching a documentary on Mongolia. If all dogs are as intelligent as Enzo, they must consider us complete fools for how we baby talk down to them. Enzo’s main human is Denny Swift (Milo Ventimiglia, Creed II), a journeyman racecar driver who picked up a Golden Retriever on impulse one day. Enzo, in his grizzled and omniscient tone says, “Call it fate. Call it luck. All I know is I was destined to be his dog.”
Even those of us who are unfamiliar with the source material know before it happens that some version of, “…and then she showed up” is inevitable. She is Eve (Amanda Seyfried, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again). Enzo is not as smart as we thought because, at first, he cannot puzzle out Eve’s utility and invasive habits until she gives birth to Zoe, played as a seven year-old by Ryan Kiera Armstrong. Enzo follows his instincts and becomes Zoe’s best friend and guardian. It’s from here in the plot where the film spends the remainder of its time charting the course of a family’s happiness and devastation, all of which I leave for you to find out. Carrying us through is Enzo’s persistent monologue with a typical sentence like, “He was a racecar driver the way I was a dog.” That line makes more sense in context.
I can only imagine the novel works because of the dog; it is the same with the film. If there was no Enzo and the story stumbled through standard emotional drama dynamics following Denny and Eve, we would most likely classify the material as Lifetime Channel fodder or Hallmark Hall of Fame stock. Denny and Eve’s problems, and especially Denny’s wretched and cliché in-laws, played by Martin Donovan (Ant-Man) and Kathy Baker (The Age of Adaline), are the stuff of a million weepers before it. Enzo is the difference maker and why situations which would otherwise exude an eye-rolling cheesiness are rounded off with the dog’s comforting quips and frequently amusing asides. Mark Bomback, the force behind the adapted screenplay, sports an action resumé - two Planet of the Apes films, a Die Hard installment, the Total Recall remake), but also has another adaptation under his belt with Insurgent, the middle child of the Divergent young adult novels. The script is strongest when Enzo talks, but settles into banal plot sequence as the audience figures out what’s going on long before Enzo or anybody in the family does.
Director Simon Curtis continues his run of weepers. 2017’s Goodbye Christopher Robin had almost all of my theater in complete hysterics and emotional meltdowns. This detour toward melodrama is eyebrow-raising considering Curtis also crafted the stellar My Week with Marilyn (2011) and the intriguing Woman in Gold (2015). Curtis dutifully shows off the standard Seattle landmarks to place us firmly in the Pacific Northwest, but in typical fashion, everything including the house and all key scenes are Vancouver, British Columbia shot. Perhaps it is spaced out better in the novel, but the film’s biggest challenge is the amount of turmoil it incessantly piles on top of Denny’s head – it is overbearing. There is no space to take a breather or shake off the previous episode before the next wave of catastrophe cascades down and threatens to drown us all. At least with This Is Us, we know it will be over in an hour. The Art of Racing in the Rain takes a season’s worth of family drama and crams it into feature-length running time smothering all pacing and momentum until the audience turns from tears into cries of mercy. Stop torturing us already! We get it, life is hard, but better with a dog.
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