Marley & Me, the movie

Marley & Me is a heart-warming, funny, feel good movie that I can’t imagine anyone not liking. I highly recommend it. I’d say it’s a great family film, except that the ending of the movie is just like the ending of the book – yes, I felt like the whole theater was crying. So I recommend it to families with kids who are old enough to understand the concept of death. Since it is based off of a memoir, I think it appeals more to adults than kids.

The casting was well done. I thought it was a bit funny that Jennifer Aniston was playing a character named Jenny. She was very good in that part. She’s not a versatile actress, but the one type of character she knows how to play, she does very well. Owen Wilson was also a good pick.

I could definitely tell that they used different dogs to portray Marley, but I didn’t know that they used 22 dogs! I watched a bit of the credits waiting to see the dogs used to portray Marley. I gave up after they started listing Jennifer Aniston’s hairdressers. I thought there might have been just 3 or 4 dogs, in which case they would list the dogs towards the beginning of the credits along with the main cast. After I got home, I looked it up online and discovered that 22 dogs were used. Twenty-two! That’s a lot of golden labs on a movie set.

Marley & Me resonates with me because I relate to the author’s life. The movie (and book) begins with John Grogan marrying his wife, Jenny. The young couple gets a puppy to start out their family before having children. I feel like that’s the stage in life that I’m in now. We’ll add a second dog to our family in a few weeks, and then maybe in a couple years we’ll add a baby.