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If you haven’t noticed, it’s tough being a dog in movies for adults. Like attending a Game of Thrones wedding in Westeros, sooner or later, the dog's gonna die.
In your typical brooding, grown-up dramas, the dog doesn't make it past the second act. The main character isn't usually present for the killing, is instead off somewhere else while his or her beloved canine is painfully eliminated in the name of vengeance, intimidation, or just plain evilness. But the dog perishes all the same. And my respect for the filmmaker, more often than not, dwindles.
It's a flip on "screwing the pooch": sacrificing the pooch.
Sometimes, the pet owner strolls back home and finds the four-legged companion's lifeless body on the ground, which happens, for instance, in last year's critically lauded 2012 film The Hunt, starring Mads Mikkelsen. Other times, the deceased animal body or just parts of its body are used for gratuitous shock effect, as in Fear, when a young Mark Wahlberg decapitates Reese Witherspoon's German Shepherd and drops its head through the kitchen's doggy door. Even worse than those are the times when we see the deaths take place on screen—think the father gunning down Sissy Spacek's character's dog in Terrence Malick's Badlands, or Max Rockatansky's loyal chum "Dog" eating the crossbow's arrow in Mad Max 2. Worst of all are the scenes that serve no thematic or logical purpose whatsoever and kill the dog just to generate a half-assed disturbance—a prime example of this, for me, is when American Psycho's Patrick Bateman murders the homeless man's pet in that back alley. It makes the sight of the naked, chainsaw-wielding Christian Bale seem childish, but for no reason at all.
Scenes of that nature are the laziest way for screenwriters and filmmakers to both elicit sympathy for their characters and cause visceral reactions from the audience. Giving a troubled, antihero a furry, barking sidekick earns he or she instant brownie points. You think, Hey, that dog sure loves him, and he sure treats the dog well—he can't be so bad, right? But your next thought should then be, So now I'll start the countdown to see how long it takes for that cute little thing to get stomped out or fed a bullet.
Once in a while, offing a movie character's dog can serve an actual purpose. The best example for such meaningful agony comes at the beginning of the little-seen 2011 British indie drama Tyrannosaur. The film opens with its principle character, Joseph (the great Peter Mullan), kicking his dog to death while in a drunken, depressed, anger-fueled stupor. It's hard to watch yet crucial to everything that follows in writer-director Paddy Considine's exceptional character study. It's Considine's challenge to himself as a storyteller, to see if he can somehow, by the film's end, make you empathize with the shell of a man whose first impression for you was annihilating an innocent, scared-looking animal. That's a feat in and of itself, unlike how those American Psycho shock-seekers who had Patrick Bateman do the same sadistic thing just because.
But what about the films where dogs can literally have their days? Rather than, you know, spending them in that kennel up in the sky.
Fortunately, they do exist. In fact, one of them opens in theaters today.
Minor spoiler for The Drop: the dog lives. That’s the movie’s most shocking aspect of a movie, and we’re talking about a hard-R-rated thriller with enough bullets fired into skulls to rival a George Romero zombie film.
It's strange but for all of Belgian director Michaël R. Roskam English-language debut's (following his powerful 2011 breakthrough Bullhead) first-class acting and tightly crafted Brooklyn noir (written by acclaimed novelist/screenwriter Dennis Lehane), the thing that struck me the most about The Drop was the fact that the adorable Pit bull puppy, "Rocco," survives.
Tom Hardy plays a tough guy cut from the same cloth as Tyrannosaur's Joseph. As expected, Hardy is an on-screen powerhouse, once again showing why people such as myself consider him to be the best actor working today. His character, Bob Saginowski, is a bartender in Brooklyn, working for his older cousin, Marv, or "Cousin Marv," played by the irreplaceable James Gandolfini, in his final movie role. Soft-spoken and passive, Bob's a physically imposing softie. There's something dangerous brewing underneath his calm demeanor, though. Inhabited by Hardy with internalized grief and rage, Bob is the kind of guy who'll open the door for you but, if you don't thank him, you'll see lava boiling in his eyes, and you'll want to walk away quickly. His suppressed darkness starts peaking through when a couple of knuckle-headed low-lives stick up Marv's bar, setting off a chain of events that puts them under hot scrutiny with the Chechen mobsters who own their bar.
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As that's all happening, Bob also finds a battered Pit pup in a garbage can outside the house of gentle stranger Nadia (Noomi Rapace). Though reluctantly at first, he takes care of the dog, which he names Rocco after St. Rocco. He gives it a safe home and plays with it, all while learning that the pup is exactly what he's needed to stop feeling like a beer-pouring loser. Because of Rocco, though, Bob soon meets the dog's original and abusive owner, Eric (Matthias Schoenaerts), a deadbeat ex-con who threatens to take the dog back and hurt it some more if Bob doesn't give him $10,000.
The Drop, which Dennis Lehane adapted from his own short story titled "Animal Rescue," treads familiar crime drama territory as those two plots violently collide, yet Tom Hardy singlehandedly keeps it fresh. Although Bob is, in his own way, just as tough as, say, Bane (The Dark Knight Rises), Charles Bronson (Bronson), and Tommy Conlon (Warrior), it's not like anything Hardy's done before. He switches off all of those showy characters' theatrics and plays Bob with incredible restraint. And when it's puppy time, Hardy displays more believable lightness in five seconds than he does in all of his calamitous, filmography-tainting romantic comedy This Means War. The scenes where Bob bonds with Rocco could be in the most Brooklyn-strong Disney family film ever made. For those brief minutes, you could be watching Marley & Me in Brooklyn and never tell the difference.
But the way Lehane has written the character, Bob's seriousness and piercing eyes always remind you that there's a dark cloud hanging above him at all times. You know something bad has happened to him in the past, and, since The Drop is an R-rated crime flick, that something just as bad, if not worse, will happen to him before the movie ends. And because Rocco is so damn cute, and because Rocco is now Bob's primary source of happiness, you're sure that Rocco will soon get rubbed out to set off Bob's inner gangster. Why else does the hulking Matthias Schoenaerts' character keep showing up whenever Bob's walking his dog?
But no, Eric doesn't beat Rocco to death to spite Bob. Nothing bad happens to the dog. How Lehane handles The Drop's Canine Savior device helps elevate the film above other antihero dramas of its type. You feel for Bob throughout, just never at the expense of his new best friend.
For once, they've spared the pooch.
Matt Barone is a Complex senior staff writer and proud German Shepherd owner who'll never watch Will Smith's I Am Legend again—you should already know why. He tweets here.
