Team Experience has been celebrating pets at the movies (and in our homes) all week. We'll wrap up Sunday. Here's Ginny O'Keefe...
The best kind of pet in any movie is a loyal one. And it doesn’t hurt if the pet is cute. Also, a sprinkle of badassery is always welcome. All that is nicely packaged in a yellow Labrador retriever named Maggie in 1994’s rafting/crime adventure film The River Wild. For those who haven’t seen this Streep vs. Bacon gem, Meryl plays rafting expert Gail who is forced to take two criminals (John C. Reilly and Kevin Bacon) down a dangerous river all the while trying to protect her son, Rourke (Joseph Mazzello), and husband Tom (David Straithairn). Along for the trip is Maggie. From the get-go, Maggie is sweet, bubbly and you can tell she loves her humans deeply. She’s also good at digging up dead bodies in the woods (spoiler). Overall, she’s a good girl. But when s**t hits the fan, then we see how great of a girl she is...
When Reilly and Bacon are discovered to be criminals on the run and hijack the family rafting trip as a means of escaping from the authorities, they decide the family is collateral damage and they aren’t afraid to kill them if it means they can get away. At one point in the film, Reilly tackles Streep to the ground to keep her from protecting her husband and Maggie doesn’t stand for that at all. She grabs Reilly by the ankle and starts biting him, he retaliates by kicking her away and at this point I am hoping Reilly gets his ass handed to him. (Later on in the film, Streep breaks his hand with an oar so it’s all good). There is nothing better than seeing a dog fiercely protecting his or her humans and it makes me realize how good dogs are and how much we really don’t deserve them. At one of the tensest moments in the film, a slimy Bacon decides that with the amount of bullets he has left, he can kill Rourke, Tom or the dog. He decides with cold eyes and a determined voice, “The dog”. Rourke then makes Maggie run away into the woods to avoid being shot. Maggie loves her humans, but she’s smart and she knows that this isn’t a situation she can survive in if she stays. So, she runs into the woods and it’s such a heart wrenching thing to watch this dog disappear and you think she will never be seen again. Seeing it from Rourke’s perspective is even more gutting because it’s a boy seeing his beloved dog run away from him.
But alas! Maggie returns to the film days later after Tom escapes from the criminals and he and Maggie find each other in the woods. She greets him with sweet and loving kisses. The best thing about Maggie is we know how resilient she is. This sweet, good girl survived alone in the mountains for days and now she’s reunited with one of her humans! She even jumps off a cliff in the third act in order to swim back to her family, all the while bonding with Tom (who hasn’t had the best relationship with her up to this point). By the end, Maggie and her family are safe and she gets a loving pats from a police officer for all her brave work. Maggie deserves more recognition as a very good girl in the PCU (Pet Cinematic Universe). Meryl Streep is her human which makes her pretty damn great.
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