74 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
Chris Sanders directs the latest adaptation of Jack London’s novel.
THECURRENTCINEMA
SUPERIOR BREEDS
“The Call of the Wild ” and “Emma.”BYANTHONYLANE
ILLUSTRATION BY JON MCNAUGHT
A
fter a period of reflection, lasting
as long as four seconds, I decided
to watch “The Call of the Wild,” a new
film of Jack London’s novel, at a dog-
friendly screening. There really was no
choice. The opportunity to see a pug
fall into a bucket of popcorn doesn’t
come along that often, and you should
grab it with both paws. And don’t worry
about the disturbance. There isn’t any.
A canine audience, I can now con-
firm, is infinitely calmer and more re-
spectful than its human equivalent. No
texting, no soda-sucking, and no chat-
ter, save for a thoughtful yap every now
and then. In the row behind me was
Paulie, the most—perhaps the only—
well-behaved cockapoo in captivity.
“He’ll fall asleep before the movie
starts,” his owner predicted, and so it
proved. The seat in front was occupied
by Gatsby, a Chinese crested, though
whether he was of the hairless or the
powderpuff variety was hard to tell in
the dark. Sometimes my view was ob-
scured by his topknot, but, that aside,
Gatsby was great. Afterward, I was in-
troduced to a French bulldog named
Daffodil, aged eleven months, and as-
sured that she had been a model of
propriety throughout. Try taking a one-
year-old child to a full-length film and
see how you get on.
The hero of the movie, as of the
novel, is Buck, a cross between a St.
Bernard and what London describes
as a “Scotch shepherd,” presumablya fervid Presbyterian. Buck, a family
pet in California, is kidnapped and
sold, learns the ropes of pulling a sled
in the frozen North, and winds up as
the free-running master of himself—“a
thing that preyed, living on the things
that lived.” Such was the template laid
down on the page, and, by and large,
it’s faithfully followed onscreen. The
one major tweak, introduced by the
writer, Michael Green, and the direc-
tor, Chris Sanders, involves the de-
meanor of Hal (Dan Stevens), a green-
horn who assumes brief ownership of
Buck. In the book, he is cruel but use-
less; in the film he becomes a villain so
melodramatic, with his bristling mus-
tache, his lunatic stare, and his suit of
scarlet plaid, that Chaplin would haverefused him entry to “The Gold Rush.”
Then, there is Harrison Ford. When
I first saw his name on the poster for
“The Call of the Wild,” I didn’t know
whether he would be playing John
Thornton, the kindly adventurer who
takes Buck under his wing, or Buck
himself. One thing’s for certain: Ford
is indisputably the shaggier dog. His
beard would be the envy of any husky,
and, as befits his growl, he serves as the
narrator, too, intoning the sort of gee-
whiz buildup (“Skagway, Alaska, gate-
way to the Yukon”) that I associate with
old travelogues on TV. Alas, poor
Thornton is saddled with a maudlin
backstory, about a son of his who died
and a marriage that collapsed. Isn’t there
enough mushing in this tale already?
Don’t the filmmakers realize that Ford
can supply the necessary sorrow with
his gaze and his voice alone? Compare
Robert Redford, in “All Is Lost” (2013),
as another lonely grump; he never re-
vealed what private storms had driven
him to sea, as a solo yachtsman, and he
was right not to. It was the quest that
counted. The rest was not our business.
What really stifles this “Call of the
Wild,” oddly enough, is Buck. In pre-
vious versions (with Clark Gable as
Thornton, say, in 1935, or Charlton Hes-
ton, in 1972), dogs were played by dogs.
Their agents wouldn’t have it any other
way. The newfangled Buck, however,
is unreal, from tail tip to snout; the
fangling was done by computer, though
Terry Notary—recently seen in “The
Square” (2017), mimicking a crazed
ape—provided a visual blueprint, per-
forming Buckishly alongside Ford. The
result is remarkable, yet it’s still a hair-
breadth away from credible, and I
reckon that the pooches in the cinema
could tell the difference. They could
spy a big Buck, and they could hear
the rustle of his digital fur, but they
couldn’t smell him. Maybe that’s why
they kept so quiet.
To return to London’s novel these
days, and to read of Buck’s desire to
“wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm
blood,” is quite a shock. Was a more
savage text ever approved for use in
schools? First published in 1903, it re-
mains ferally fast and lithe, the teeth
of the prose barely blunted by the years,
and there’s something prophetic, at the
start of a warring century, in London’s