Marley & Me, I Hate You (spoilers)

[digg=http://digg.com/movies/Marley_Me_I_Hate_You]I watched Marley & Me over the weekend. It was hard to get into because Jennifer Aniston had something really weird going on with her face, as if she had visited a Botox-happy dermatologist right before filming. It was also hard to take great joy in the movie because I had been spoiled about the ending. (If you don’t want to know, stop reading now, because spoilers follow.)

Since before Mr. Pop Culture Curmudgeon and I got our Greater Swiss Mountain Dog and Bernese Mountain Dog, we had been reading of the horrors of bloat and gastric torsion. Both of our dog breeds are prone to bloat (even mom’s miniature dachshund is a bloat risk), and it can be a quick killer. It is a condition where you call the emergency vet while you are driving there–you don’t call to see if you should come in, you just go if your dog exhibits any of the signs, even a sign as small as not acting like himself. I had been warned by members of the Bernese Mountain Dog Yahoo group that bloat is what killed Marley, so it was actually scary to watch. I couldn’t stop thinking about the time when we might experience that with one of our dogs.

The movie is a wonderful look at how you care for an aging dog. The Grogans make Marley happy and keep him with them as long as he still loves life. Then, when Marley is no longer able to recover from repeated episodes of bloat and gastric torsion, they put him to sleep so that he would no longer suffer. I’ve had to put quite a few animals to sleep over the years, and they did a wonderful job of capturing the experience.

I don’t know if I recommend the movie or not. It had its moments–Marley reminds me a lot of our Swissy–and, like I said, it was wonderfully accurate and provided important information about bloat. It focused more on the Me than on the Marley; I get the feeling that the book contained more doggy details than the movie. But it was so sad. And not sad in a Bridge to Terabithia or Gone with the Wind way. Sad in a way that was depressing, not cathartic.

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