Dog Watch: Lassie (1994)

Watched:  07/13/2023

Format:  BluRay

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Daniel Petrie

Like all good Gen-X'ers, I grew up in the aftershocks of the baby boomers, and Lassie - the very clever collie - was certainly a character and concept we knew of, if not through direct experience, then by osmosis.  I guess there was a book, originally (1940).  Our canine hero starred in wildly popular movies beginning in the 1940's (it's where Roddy McDowall got his start as a lad) and television - running for a cool 20 years, from 1954-1974.  Plus several more movies and TV shows over the years people who are not huge Lassie fans probably are unaware of.

I know!  That's a lot of Lassies.  

The artificial monoculture created via mass media and limited outlets did, at least, give us a chance to have some familiar talking points, and you never knew where they'd coalesce.  Personally, I didn't watch Lassie in reruns.  Or the movies.*  For most of us, Lassie was one or two jokes about kids falling down wells and dogs alerting us to calamity.  Maybe we whistled the theme song at our dogs.  

This 1994 film is more or less an original story, but if you know anything at all about Lassie from the TV show, etc... this movie carries on quite a bit of the world's bravest, smartest, wisest dog *and* best friend to a boy who needs one.  This dog seems like it's ready to pick locks and drive cars.  Three cheers for Lassie.

Our story:  

A family is moving from Baltimore (I suppose they heard Omar's coming) and to the - get this - home of the now deceased mom, a farmhouse in rural Virginia (it was shot in West Virginia, more on that in a bit).  Dad has made the very, very wise choice to remarry in the form of Helen Slater, who is game for this move that - upon introspection - seems kinda weird and sad.  The daughter/ sister is relentlessly cheerful in the way of movie characters who need to exist for color but who will not be impacting the plot.  

The son is, of course, roughly 12 or 13 and 90's-furious about being taken from the big city, complaining relentlessly while listening to Alice in Chains while skateboarding.  He's that "cool" 90's kid you'd seen in commercials and catalogs from which visions of Poochie sprang.  And allowed to mouth off to his parents in a way that would have gotten most kids in that era shot out of a cannon.

Curiously, the 1950's Lassie show is diegetic to this show - something the younger sister watches - and lends its name to the Lassie of the film.  

Ok, so, Lassie in this movie is the beloved pet and working dog of a faceless sheep rancher who dies tragically at the start of the film and the family gawks at as authorities haul off the body.  They then make off with the dog.  It is... weird.  But that's how they set up that this family has to do zero training with their thoroughbred dog no one noticed lurking around the accident scene (I guess fuck that guy's family, giving them something else to worry about).  But it also seems like *someone* would have come around saying "my uncle died and we can't find his dog".  

Here's the thing - this movie is *gorgeous*.  That's my primary memory of the movie from 30 years ago.  Or, maybe, "West Virginia is gorgeous, and here it is in this movie."  I couldn't really remember anything but "family moves to farm, there is a dog" and then sweeping scenery with rolling hills and beautiful trees and meadows.  So, say what you will about everything else (except Helen Slater), but it's lovely and I want to go to there.

The DP is Kenneth MacMillan, who was a veteran of the film industry, and recently shot Henry V.  By 1994, film stock itself was able to do an amazing job of capturing detail and color, and there's not much in the way of processed shots.  They're just letting the background do the heavy lifting.  I don't want to oversell it, but it's money well-spent in a movie that was probably imagined to be filmed on one of two ranches we've all seen a 1000 times before outside of LA.

Director Daniel Petrie was no slouch, either.  He wasn't a prestige director, but he did work on high-end TV movies and some feature films.

I sold Jamie on the film, describing it as "the gentlest movie you'll ever see".  But, because that was because I didn't really remember the movie.  The film includes genuine attempts at telling an actual all-ages story about a family living in the shadow of death that winds up pulling together and a boy who works through his grief.  I won't say it's *because* of the dog - but Lassie certainly helps move the story along.  Also, we borrow heavily from Shane and ranchers wanting their grazing land at any cost.  Admittedly, this makes way less sense in 1990's Virginia than in remote spots in the 19th Century west.  But there's also stuff like... wolf attacks.

It's also a reminder that pre-2000 family movies were pretty open about dysfunctional or complicated families, taking trauma at face value and the fact that bad shit happens is part of life, but not something to drown in.  It's something to overcome.  Maybe with your dog.  While fighting off wolves.

One thing Jamie pointed out was that these kids aren't... special.  They aren't the best at anything or a star or popular.  They're allowed to be "everyman" kids in a way that used to be SOP for kids stuff.  They have friction with their folks and their greatest concern is not about disappointing the parents in the film and their expectations of them (which sure feels like the go-to these days).  The parents are there and a focus, but they act as much as antagonist as ally, but no one is putting specific pressure on the kids.  Also:  Teens smoke.  Mom's die and kids grieve them with no therapy.  Dads move on and make huge life decisions for the family with minimal consulting of kids.  Kids are dumb about guns.   

That's not a call out of "we were right then, it's wrong now".  I just find it an interesting pivot.

I'm not going to sell this as anything but a movie that is better than you probably expect and better than it had to be.  The kid actors are not bad - this is the first film appearance of Michelle Williams!  The adults include Richard Farnsworth as the dead-Mom's dad and Frederic Forrest as the rancher next door.  I'm less familiar with John Tenney who played the dad.  But, of course, Helen Slater is lovely.

The dog itself is very well trained, and almost always nails what it's asked to do except maybe the one key thing dog trainers rarely figure out:  how to make the dog look like it cares at all about the actor who is supposed to be their best friend.  

Like, look, I live with dogs.  I know what it means to have a dog deeply focused on you, and the dog looking off camera stone-faced awaiting their next command ain't it.  Of course, I watched ten minutes of the recent Call of the Wild on cable, and a CGI dog acting like a cartoon ain't it, either.  But, man, if dogs acted crazy the way they do when they want to tell you they love you?  That would sell it.  Here, it makes the final scene a little...  underwhelming.

There remains a constant trickle of Lassie material, including a cartoon and live action movie out of Germany, I believe.  I guess American kids don't give a shit about dogs these days.  But - as you may have picked up on - I'm fascinated with how stuff that was popular for decades will quietly get consigned to the pop-culture dust bin.  From cowboy stuff to heroic dogs to Dick Tracy.

A quick Google search will tell you that the breeding of Lassies and who owns the idea and whatnot of Lassie and the pedigree is almost as messy as Rin-Tin-Tin, with a lot of dead URLs.  I can't quite figure out who owns the bloodline, but it looks like it's now an offshoot of the Rough Collie and registered with AKC?  But much like Rin-Tin-Tin, it's very confusing and I figure there's maybe a few hundred to a few thousand who know what the full story is at this point, and that ain't me.

I once saw a Lassie at the mall I worked at in Austin (Highland Mall, circa 1997) and had planned to stand in line to meet Lassie myself til I figured out it was at least an hour wait with moms and their young daughters.  I chose to not look like a psycho to the moms in line and just head on out.  And I regret it.  A nice, signed 8x10 from Lassie would have been nice.

All in all, I'd rather meet Helen Slater.  And now I'd ask her to sign my Lassie disc.

Also, did not have this on my "Lassie Research Bingo Card".

Apparently, according to what I read:  a strong maybe?

*I did watch a Rin-Tin-Tin show, briefly, on The Family Channel, but not the original movies or TV show