Hotel for Dogs

Seeing a movie at the Fine Arts in Maynard was so fun on a Sunday afternoon, I decided to stick around for a second matinee. There was an hour break between the shows, and in the bitter cold, I killed time in the only place available, a McDonalds. I sat in the sunlight and eavesdropped as a older woman ate lunch with her grandson.

They had just seen Hotel for Dogs, and she asked me which dog he liked best. Then she slipped into reminiscence: "When your daddy was young, we used to eat in a booth that was over in that corner, before they renovated it. You know what a booth is, right?"

After I finished my coffee, I walked back to the Fine Arts and bought a ticket for the movie the woman and her grandson had just seen. The early show of Hotel for Dogs had been in the giant main auditorium, and I went inside and took a seat, pleased to have the experience of the being in the larger hall. Before the trailers, I examined the large Chinese prints on the wall, the remnants of the late 1940's decor.

I noticed the crowd was much thinner, and mostly older folks. When the movie started, I realized that it was Gran Torino, and so I quickly slipped out of the theater. Much to my chagrin, the late afternoon show of Hotel for Dogs was in the same narrow little auditorium where I'd just Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

The movie hadn't started yet, but the theater was cram-packed of families with very loud kids. All the back rows were already taken, and I found myself way up front in one of the last empty rows. I took a seat next to the wall, so as to allow another family to use the seats by the aisle. It felt awkward being the only solo middle-aged guy in attendance in such a small auditorium. But I was just glad that the family behind me seemed to be decently behaved. Moreover the popcorn here was in cups and tubs, instead of the infernal crinkly plastic bags at the AMC outlets.

I'd been seeing the trailer to this movie for almost six months. For some reason they had started showing it last summer at the second-run theater in Fort Collins, and I thought it was coming out soon. I was glad to finally cross it off my list.

It was, moreover, the fourth canine movie in as many months, following Beverly Hills Chihuahua (real dogs with human voice over), Bolt (animation), and Marley and Me (real dog that doesn't talk). Hotel for Dogs fell into the last of those three genres, in that the dogs, while displaying unusual intelligence are nevertheless "normal" and do not speak in voice overs.

The basic set-up of the story is the "orphaned child(ren) with mean step-parents" paradigm from fairy tales. The resolution to the story must eventually involve the children finding a suitable set of loving parents.

The canine-level of the story functions as a mirror of the human-level fairy tale. The dogs are themselves orphaned, taken from the streets or liberated from the city pound (which is not a no-kill shelter). Thus the story must bring about a suitable resolution to the dogs' plight as well as the children.

The movie turned out to be far more in the fantasy realm than I anticipated from the trailer. One of these premises is the "abandoned building" fantasy, one I've seen several times in the last year, and which has long been a Hollywood staple. In this incarnation we have a long-abandoned inner city hotel, boarded up and left intact for many decades with all its furnishings undisturbed, like a giant e-bay treasure trove, just waiting for two young children to discover it.

It reminds me of the the kind of thing I used to think actually existed in cities, while I was growing up in a small town in the Midwest.

The second fantasy premise is that of the whiz-kid child inventor (a nine-year-old boy), who is able to construct any manner of elaborate Rube Goldberg inventions, most of which will be used to serve the needs of the many dogs in the "hotel."

The third fantasy premise involves the intelligence of the dogs, who are able to understand and follow the rules of the "hotel," including the patient use of all the aforementioned Rube Goldberg devices.

At first the whole scheme of saving the dogs in the abandoned building works, and they even get the help of a few underage collaborators, all of whom are cool with the idea (making this a nice children vs. adult fantasy as well).

The story demands a complication, however, a threat not only to the children's foster-family status, but also to the hotel. In fact, the hotel scheme must be exposed to eventually clear the way for a stable, above-board solution to the dogs' plight.

All of this plays out in due course during the first seventy minutes of the movie. It all worked fairly well for me. Being a Kevin Dillon fan, I enjoyed his performance as the immature foster dad alongside Lisa Kudrow, functioning as the gentle comic foils to the childrens' dog-saving scheme.

Where I felt the movie let me down was in the conclusion. For a movie with this much fantasy to work, we eventually need to come down at least partially from the fantasy level, back into the normal world. This allows the audience to walk out of the theater having experienced the fantasy roller coaster ride, while sensing a suitable sense of emotional resolution back to the "normal" world, where the characters can live forever in stable fashion.

In Hotel for Dogs, however, the resolution takes us to an even higher level of fantasy, one that outdoes the previous layers in a rather outrageous fashion. It's a fun resolution, to be sure, but it felt too unreal to me to be the proper resolution of the orphaned children fairy tale. The fact that the children are allowed to openly break the law without consequence also did not help.

Specifically the ending didn't work because the fantasy resolution to the dog story makes the adoption of the children by a real family seem similarly unrealistic. In this way the movie comes off, on a deep emotional level, as a cynical commentary that the children in the movie were, in fact, unadoptable, and could be so only in a world of outrageous open-ended fantasy.

After the movie ended, as a consequence for missing out on the main auditorium, I slipped in and watched the last five minutes of Gran Torino again, including the Clint Eastwood song over the closing credits along Lake St. Clair. Now that's a nice resolution to a fantasy.