Marley and Me

Just the other day I caught ‘Marley and Me’ at the movies and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was refreshing, fun and heartwarming. Perfect for a Friday night. While the focus of the movie is the undisciplined dog (Marley) who wrecks havoc in his owners’ lives, there were many other lessons to glean from it.

It was, to me, a very ‘un-Hollywood’ romantic movie - there was no glamourization of sex, no swearing, no romantic unrealistic ideas of love and no cheating husband. The movie captured the realities of family life, balancing work and leisure and raising kids to the extent that half way through the movie, I thought to myself ‘more people should watch and understand this – maybe less marriages will fall apart’.

At one point, Jenny (the wife, played by Jennifer Aniston) breaks down, completely overwhelmed with exhaustion and the enormity of raising two kids, the uncontrollable dog and managing the household. She yells at her husband John (Owen Wilson) and demands that he gets rid of Marley. He obliges by taking Marley to his mate’s house.

Once she had calmed down, however, and thought things through, they talk about it and she says, “I made a choice. I made a choice and I’m going to stick with it. Getting rid of Marley isn’t the solution. Getting rid of you (John) isn’t the solution. We made a choice, and we’re going to do it together”.

At that point, I thought to myself – that’s exactly what commitment is! They made a choice. And they’re making a choice to stick with it.

John’s hedonistic friend, Sebastian, plays the cynic who thinks John is better off leaving his wife.

“Is there no fight big enough that you will leave? No depression intense enough? No anger or emotion antagonistic enough that you will say bye to it all?” he asks John.

To which John replies, “No, no, no! So we had a fight. So what? I still love her. I love her and we’ll work it out.”

Brilliant!
He’s committed, faithful and willing to work it out.

If only more people lived their lives like that. Divorce rates might actually fall.

When Jenny has her second child she chooses to be a stay home mom. She couldn’t do both her job and be a mom well and says she’d rather choose her family over work. Now I’m not saying that being a stay home mom is the only way to raise children. What I find more important is her willingness and desire to make that selfless sacrifice to put her family first; at the expense of a job she loved so much. She understood that having kids meant putting their needs above her own.

I wish more parents understood that. Maybe there’d be less troubled kids at schools.

Marley and Me is the second good movie I’ve seen this year. In Good Company was the other. In that movie, Dennis Quaid’s character says on commitment (excuse the crassness) “you find a good fox to share your life in the foxhole. And when you’re outside the foxhole, you keep your dick in your pants.”

A tad crude, but oh so true!

I wish they’d make more movies like Marley and Me. It was wholesome, entertaining and reflected good values. Pop culture would do well with more of that.