Even the dog in A Dog's Perfect Christmas thinks you're stupid
The generic and joyless holiday film never stops explaining itself, assuming someone on their phone accidentally selected it.
Photo: Netflix
In A Dog’s Perfect Christmas, the holiday-themed companion film to ready-made tearjerkers A Dog’s Purpose and A Dog’s Journey, a pumpkin pie arrives at a family dinner table. It’s Thanksgiving, and the characters need a pick-me-up, so they’re skipping dinner and diving right for dessert. No time for plates, just spray on some whipped cream and grab some forks. A wide shot reminds us that there are twin boys in the scene, little angels who’d probably love a piece of pie, or even just a dollop of whipped cream, at a time like this. A second later, the camera cuts to two adults, who dig into the treat and have a heart-to-heart. The children, who moments earlier were right there, have mysteriously vanished. This is A Dog’s Perfect Christmas in microcosm: These children are not characters, any more than the dog who narrates the entire movie is a character, though he at least has dialogue. Like the colored balls that will soon decorate their Christmas tree, they are ornaments, nice-looking representations of something the movie has perhaps heard about but never actually had. But that’s fine for A Dog’s Perfect Christmas, a film that believes that as long as it tells you something is meaningful, it will be.
The condescending, unimaginative tone-setting begins with the dog. Winstead is an adorable Basset Hound voiced by Thomas Haden Church. He’s our entry point into this world, and he lays out the history of his “pack,” the family of humans with whom he’s shared his life. This family could charitably be described as “the family in the photo the frame came with.” Sander (Dennis Quaid), the patriarch, is Winstead’s owner, widowed two years, which has left him not so much a person as a shambling bathrobe draped with human hair. Sander’s son Hunter (Milo Ventimiglia) is the family breadwinner, doing well enough to afford an expansive lakeside home, while his wife Juliana (Kathleen Rose Perkins), a lawyer, puts her career on hold to take care of the aforementioned twins. Then there’s Ello (Brooke Lena Johnson), the pair’s 17-year-old daughter who loathes them and her grandfather. She hates them because she’s 17, just like being a workaholic is what Hunter does and being a frustrated professional who feels trapped by motherhood is what Juliana does.
The movie does not wish to explore any of these archetypal forms any deeper, so don’t get your hopes up. But between Sander’s grief, Hunter’s focus on work, Juliana’s mounting stress and chronic illness, and Ello’s teenager angst, things aren’t going well at the family home, which Winstead picks up on. We know this because Winstead chimes in occasionally with helpful asides like, “Hunter Dad smells sad.”
You can probably guess where things go from here. With Winstead’s help, and the help of an adorable Corgi puppy named Ruby, which Ello finds out in the cold, the family must navigate a life-threatening crisis and come together for the holidays. There are, broadly speaking, dozens, if not hundreds of movies about this very same thing. This isn’t even the first movie to navigate all this with the help of a dog (Love The Coopers gave all this a holiday bent a decade ago), yet none of those formulaic structural things are in any way what’s wrong with A Dog’s Perfect Christmas. If anything, they provide a rickety but recognizable structure to something that might stand on its own for a little while, but crumbles upon minimal inspection.
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