Review: 'My Dog Skip'

My Dog Skip is the movie for people who don't get dog people. If you don't understand how some folks can live with dog hair in the house, embarrassing sniffing, and a relentless walking regimen, watch this movie. You'll get it long before the credits roll by.

My Dog Skip is about Skip and a geeky misfit of a kid whose pup helps him mediate the strange and irrational world within just beyond the front door of the family home.

Skip's winsome ways, fearless loyalty, playful spirit, and honest love win him a place in the heart and bed of his human friend Willy Morris as well as a revered place in Yazoo, Mississippi, where Willy is growing up. The movie is based on Willie Morris's memoir of his childhood.

Starring Kevin Bacon as Willy's remote and dispirited father, Diane Lane as his capable and sensitive mother, and Frankie Muniz as Willy, My Dog Skip is about living up to the loyalty of your friends despite your setbacks and failures. Not everyone can do that.

It's easier to walk away when things go wrong, to justify bad choices and bad behavior, to quit. In the small town world of rural wartime Mississippi, that can't happen. All anyone has is himself, his friends and family, his neighbors. To stay home is to make life work even if it takes a while and even if it's just about impossible.

My husband borrowed My Dog Skip from the library so we could watch it with our nine-year-old daughter. It was a good, though challenging, choice. Watching it, we felt the power of love, the agony of betrayal, the pure grace of forgiveness and friendship.