My Dog Skip

A film about childhood set in Mississippi. The year is 1942. Willie is nine, an only child, and has no friends. His father came back from a war disabled. He is hard, distant, and wants his son involved in nothing. A dog arrives on his birthday. His mother brought it; his father objected and lost. The dog is called Skip. From there the film is a story about a town. Baseball, school, neighbours, a cemetery and the river. Skip finds the boy friends. The dog talks to everyone and Willie follows after him. There is a girl. Rivers lives nearby; Willie likes her and cannot say so. There is Dink as well. The town's athletic star; he went to the war and when he came back everyone turned away from him. The narrative gives that line as something the boy does not understand and does not explain it. One night Willie goes to the cemetery. The older boys trick him and it ends badly. What the narrative is interested in is not a dog but a passage: its idea is that the boy sees one thing after another in the adult world that he does not understand, and that the dog is the only fixed thing through it. The father's line opens slowly. His hardness comes from something he lost in the war and he does not say it to the end. The last section moves forward in time and the narrator is grown. The source is Willie Morris's own memoir; he grew up in Mississippi and wrote the book near the end of his life. The telling runs on voiceover. Frankie Muniz, Diane Lane, Kevin Bacon, Luke Wilson and Bradley Coryell are in the cast. Jay Russell directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes family films and nostalgic stories of childhood. Who it is not for: anyone bothered by emotional manipulation; the last section is openly aiming to make you cry.