On demand: "Hachi: a Dog's Tale"

Released theatrically everywhere but the US, where it was dumped onto DVD and then the Hallmark Channel, 2009's Hachi: a Dog's Tale was Lasse Hallström's 21st century update of the Old Yeller animal-weepie model, with Richard Gere as the somewhat unlikely professor of contemporary dance who finds a stray Japanese husky puppy on a railway platform and takes it back to the home he shares with wife Joan Allen. There, we're treated to innumerable loving close-ups of the increasingly big floof as he eats popcorn, stares winsomely at a steak sizzling on a barbeque and watches on, with apparent sadness in his eyes, as his master sets off for work each morning; these are interspersed with doggy POV shots in canine black-and-white. It's only some way in that Hallström and screenwriter Stephen P. Lindsey serve notice that the whole movie will be steeped in love and loss - that the Gere-Allen pairing have adopted this fuzzy new arrival as a replacement of sorts for a son who died young and a daughter in the process of flying the nest. The moral of the film turns out to be something like this: humans may come and go, but man's best friend remains loyal to the last.

The primary achievement of Hachi, by some measure the strongest film in this whole damp-eyed, wet-nosed cycle, is a rare delicacy of tone; that may be down to the source, a Japanese movie of 1987 (Hachi-ko monogatari) based on local doggo legend. (Hallström gestures to continuity of a sort by casting the Japanese-born Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as a friend and colleague of Professor Gere.) Even in the early, sunnier stages - before grief begins to cloud the picture - Hachi is always more poignant than cutesy, largely dialogue-free, powered by the unspoken bond between its constituent creatures and a lilting piano score (by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek) that connects the professor's day job to Joe Hisaishi's work on certain Miyazaki films. Hallström directs his four-legged performers (Layla, Chico and Forrest) every bit as well as his two-legged stars, locating meaning in their every look, and real precision in the manner in which they occupy and cross the frame. The bear dog-poodle romance at the film's heart is a smashing job of wordless storytelling, although it's clear Hachi really only has eyes for Dicky G. And why not, given what a fine, expressive performer Gere had become by this stage: he works up an obvious chemistry with the pooch(es), but is just as good stood before class, setting out the film's other thesis about the finite and the infinite, and how love and art will always outlast us. In the wake of 1985's Oscar-winning My Life as a Dog, Hallström became equally renowned and derided for trading in insistently middlebrow crowdpleasers that saw their audience coming and took precious few risks accordingly. With Hachi, he takes at least one big gamble with regard to the way this story pans out, and finally makes it work rather beautifully. The result deserves to be better known as Hallström's stealth masterpiece - the one title in this filmography that even doglovers wouldn't expect to be both as well-executed and as affecting as it is.

Hachi: a Dog's Tale is now streaming via YouTube, and available to rent via YouTube and Prime Video.