Movie Review: 'The Art of Racing in the Rain' Is Yet Another Bad Dog Movie

The spate of mediocre dog movies in 2019 is threatening to turn me into a cat person. A Dog’s Journey and A Dog’s Way Home are so interchangeably forgettable that, even though I wrote about both movies, I can’t recall how to tell them apart a mere few months later. I can recall that both attempted to pull tears from my eyes with the emotional equivalent of pliers but beyond that, both films are just unmemorable and mediocre.

The Art of Racing in the Rain is no better. This latest dog movie stars This is Us star Milo Ventimiglia, Amanda Seyfried and the voice of Kevin Costner as Enzo the Dog. Directed by Simon Curtis (My Week with Marilyn), the film has a sheen of professionalism but all of the same emotionally manipulative tooling as every other dog movie since the far superior, and actually not terrible, Marley & Me.

The Art of Racing in the Rain stars Milo Ventimiglia as race car driver, Denny. One day, on the way home from a race, for reasons he can’t quite explain, Denny finds himself drawn in by a sign that says Puppies for Sale. As if by a force outside of himself, Denny is compelled to turn down a dirt road to a dusty farmhouse where a kindly farmer and his wife crack wise about not wanting to give up their prize pups, but it’s the same, well-practiced, wisecracks they make each time they sell a pup.

None of that matters to Denny who immediately connects with one of the dogs. He takes him home and names him Enzo, after Enzo Ferrari. The two become inseparable with Enzo even joining Denny at the race track where we learn from Enzo’s voiceover, delivered with gravelly, world weary gravitas by Kevin Costner, that Enzo too has fallen in love with racing. Enzo watches every twist and turn of Denny’s races and spends nights cuddling with his owner while he watches old formula one races and with no one else to talk to, explains to Enzo why the winner managed to win the race.

The idyll of Denny and Enzo is disturbed when Denny meets Eve (Amanda Seyfried). Enzo is suspicious of Eve’s intentions with Denny. Then he becomes jealous, at least in voiceover, the dog on screen doesn’t appear to care either way about Eve/Seyfried beyond hitting the marks where he’s supposed to be when Seyfried is on screen. Eventually, after Denny and Eve get married and Eve becomes pregnant, Enzo comes to accept and care for Eve.

Where The Art of Racing in the Rain goes from there is straight out of a Lifetime movie, only on a much larger budget. There is a dramatic disease indicating cough, there is a series of dog in peril scenes and, most notably, a series of overly melodramatic and deeply forced scenes intended to pry tears from the eyes of dog owners across the globe. We go to the movies to be manipulated into feeling many things but the best movies don’t feel manipulative. The Art of Racing in the Rain may as well be trying to reach into your eyeballs to grab the tears.

The Art of Racing in the Rain uses Cancer, Animal endangerment, and a child custody battle like cudgels to beat the emotional response out of you. The poorly demonstrated, lazy and egregious manipulations of The Art of Racing in the Rain are most prominent in the performance of Martin Donovan as Maxwell, Eve’s father. Maxwell is the villain of a movie that should not have a villain. The story is supposed to feel like a slice of real life but Maxwell is a baddie better suited for the 1930s when class warfare made rich daddies the perfect villain for the broad love stories of the day. Maxwell is a torpid anachronism in a modern movie.

That’s without even getting to how Maxwell is employed as a storytelling device. Maxwell’s evil drives the plot in the final act of The Art of Racing in the Rain with his increasingly malevolent decisions creating an outsized, borderline Job-ian obstacle for Denny. The horrors that Maxwell visits upon his son in law in the final act are Brobdingnagian and unnecessary. The things that Maxwell does are inhuman and for reasons that the movie is too lazy to explain beyond ‘he’s rich and old and no one is good enough for his daughter,’ an achingly creaky cliche.

It’s a shame too because there are ways in which The Art of Racing in the Rain might have worked. I actually didn’t mind the vocal performance of Kevin Costner. When I saw the first trailer I thought Costner was a strange choice for the voice of a dog that was going to start off as a puppy in the story, but Costner gives the dog’s inner voice an old soul quality that is easy to like. There are a few awkward line deliveries throughout and a nightmare sequence with a stuffed zebra that was desperately out of place, but that wasn’t Costner’s fault. Costner’s voiceover is the one consistently good thing about this otherwise mediocre and indolent dog flick.

If you can’t tell from the title, racing is intended as a metaphor for life. Just typing that sentence I got a little queasy at how desperately lame that is. Perhaps racing could be a metaphor for life if the filmmakers had allowed that point to speak for itself without having to spoon feed it via the title and several exchanges of forced dialogue that amounts to little more than soundbites underlying a point that life is about twists and turns. Profound right? I think I may have seen that message on a Starbucks cup.

Vin Diesel living his life ‘a quarter mile at a time’ is looking down on that type of treacle.