What will Disney do when it runs out of cartoons to remake? I suppose the better question to ask is, “Do you think Disney is through cashing in on Aladdin or The Lion King?” Yeah, I don’t, either. I don’t know what the future brings, but I can guarantee we’re not done with Cinderellas or Beasts or Beauties, be they conscious or otherwise. And with that in mind, the reboot-of-the-week was such a misfire, Disney executives wisely kept it away from movie theaters. I speak, of course, about a tale that is a dog in every sense of the word, Lady and the Tramp.
Set in a world that doesn’t exist, this story of puppy love falls as flat as the Paul Anka original song. Let me try and describe the backdrop for a bit – the upscale outskirts of a city where steamboats and jazz are a thing, as are horse-drawn wagons mingled with them new-fangled horseless carriages all waltzing about on streets of cobblestone. I’m guessing 1910 New Orleans is where this picture is supposed to take place …and if not New Orleans, certainly some major city on the lower Mississippi.
However, the mechanics of the picture undermine the geographic time/space assumption. While one can forgive the complete lack of accents, the demographics are … off. As an interracial married couple, Thomas Mann and Kiersey Clemons would have been illegal at the time, and double secret illegal in the turn-of-the-century South. I’m all for integration and diversity in all things, but that doesn’t mean history wasn’t history. You want to imagine the most integrated happy-go-lucky-we’re-all-God’s-creatures ragtime era ever, go for it. Just don’t expect to submit your “period piece” as a period peace and expect history not to give you the side eye.
What I’m truly trying to say here is that in a film with talking dogs, I was least impressed reality-wise, by the setting. ‘Nuff said. The film opens on one Christmas, where Jim (Mann) gives Darling (Clemons) a cocker spaniel. Clearly, any household in which there’s a person going by “Darling” isn’t great at naming stuff, so we can’t be surprised when
the family names the dog “Lady” (voice of Tessa Thompson). Lady’s life is vacuous and uneventful; the film follows suit, biding its time waiting for a plot to show up.
On the other side of town, which is also strangely and harmoniously integrated, there lives the cleanest stray dog one might ever find, Tramp (Justin Theroux). Tramp has constant run-ins with the po-po (not the Alpo), but can always be counted on to recreate the begging waif scene from Aladdin (in dog terms) to show the audience that he has a heart of gold. Awwww … and “seen it.”
Lady and the Tramp are bound for tepid romance, that’s for sure, but only if they can avoid that pesky dogcatcher (Adrian Martinez), the dastardly villain of this saga. And saga it is. Imdb says 103 minutes, Disney+ gave me a 111 minute runtime, and –I’m tellin’ ya- this film would have seemed long at 80 minutes. There just isn’t enough meat on this dogbone.
Part of the problem with this anthropomorphic crap is that dogs don’t act. We’ve been here before in half-dozen films where the dog plays a major role without having a speaking part. In a film where the dogs actually do speak, it seems even worse, because their acting expressions rarely match their words. Take, for instance, the iconic shared spaghetti scene in the original cartoon: in the first Lady and the Tramp, they both seem surprised and excited by their appetites leading to a lip-lock moment. Here, they’re dogs. Dogs don’t kiss. It doesn’t work. Adding poor F. Murray Abraham to this scene doesn’t help.
This film is not without charm or a small amount of humor, but it’s far too long for adults, much less the audience who might enjoy a dog-escapes-the-dogcatcher bit of slapstick. It’s a nice film to look at, and I applaud the PC sensibilities no matter how historically inaccurate, but there’s no way I recommend this film … at all. Go watch the cartoon if you must.
Another remake that pushes the camp
With moments stolen from that one with the lamp
There’s a dog named Lady
And her fella so shady
In the sequel, she gets a Tramp stamp
Rated PG, 103 Minutes
Director: Charlie Bean
Writers: Andrew Bujalski, Kari Granlund
Genre: Cashing in on the Disney remake parade
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Dog people
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Cat People
