Lassie

NO INSULIN REQUIRED

Lassie Come Home, with little Roddy McDowall and a littler Elizabeth Taylor (with unnerving adult face), is such a beloved classic, and still very popular in rentals, you want to bemoan the generational impulse for remakes. How many more sob-clobbers do we have to suffer? But not long into Charles Sturridge’s Lassie, you’re enveloped by its graceful mode—smooth, often elegant, the richly evocative Irish environs just before WWII. It’s comforting to sit back and enjoy the craftsmanship of the director and his brisk adaption of Eric Knight’s novel, Howard Atherton’s warm and appealing photography, Adrian Johnston’s unmelodramatic score, the fresh and unfamiliar faces, and most especially enjoy watching Peter O’Toole bring star power and prestige to the proceedings and having a jolly hammy time of it. (My favorite line of his, to the granddaughter: “Come on, Girlie.”) In the McDowall part is mumbly Jonathan Mason, whose face is a miniature mix of Barry Manilow and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and in the Taylor role, Hester Odgers, who walks down a narrow road looking ready for a shabby chic spread in Miranda Priestly’s Runway. The two kids are more than adequate—and Odgers’ pre-adult prescience earns our giggles—and what’s welcomely missing, despite their love for the collie (whose real name is Mason, but no relation), is they’re not sappy crybabies out to guilt trip the adults. Sturridge slips in an implicit animal rights attitude—minus the bumbling villains, almost all the adults have a protectiveness toward the dog. (The Xmas night sequence turns into an emotional Invasion of the Dog Guardians.) Sturridge, who won a lot of us over with Brideshead Revisited, a marathon session about drugged-out fags and faggish intellectuals, and with Gulliver’s Travels, the most confusing yet prettiest TV mess you’ve ever seen, isn’t the type of director one associates with a movie about the love of dogs. Precisely because he isn’t makes what he’s done all the more charming: he sets up a tiny bit of class warfare when a fox hunt goes goofy and the fox ends up in a coal mine; he sneaks in a whimsical moment when cameos Edward Fox and John Standing feel the legend of Loch Nest undulating beneath their boat; and there’s an unexpected chuckle or two when Lassie ends up on a witness stand. The movie’s longest segment is devoted to Rowlie the dwarf puppeteer; it underwent some trims, and could have used a few additional cuts, but there’s a genuine unsticky poignancy in Peter Dinklage’s performance. A fair lack of sentimentality in the parents of the boy as well: weathered and hardy Samantha Morton and black-haired and handsome-in-an-irregular-way John Lynch refurbish the mold set by Anne Revere in National Velvet. Star Lassie, with a thick mane as majestic as a lion king’s, isn’t the only lovable dog: there’s Cricket the barking 911 and Toots, a sort of Benji owned by Rowlie. (With the animals we see how much difficulty there is in editing out bits and pieces of the animals’ and particularly Lassie’s movements being coached by trainers behind the cameras. Coming to the set without any formal canine training, and somewhat short on demonstrative affection, Mason’s no Beethoven or Pongo from the Glenn Close version of 101 Dalmatians.) We probably could do without the last visuals; as behaved as we are throughout, we’re tempted to want to start singing “The hills are alive with the smells of Lassies...” What’s so engaging about Lassie isn’t not being allowed to slobber—it would be inexcusable if we couldn’t—it’s Sturridge curbing the sap without the need for precautionary insulin shots. Winner of the 2006 Irish Film and Television Award for best sound, headed by Ardmore Sound supervisor Patrick Drummond.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com