Dogs are not only man’s best friend — they are also man’s oldest. We domesticated dogs so long ago that there are no written records of a time when they were not part of our households. (Writing was invented a little over 5,000 years ago; the domestication of dogs occurred somewhere between 6,000 and 14,000 years ago.) It is only natural, then, that there should be great works of art focused on the relationship between humans and dogs. The past century and a half has seen a flourishing of such works: Sounder, Old Yeller, Shiloh, The Hundred and One Dalmatians, Where the Red Fern Grows (to this day, the only novel that has made me cry). But the book that started it all, the book that launched the craze for canine-centered writing that authors from Stephen King to Dean Koontz, John Steinbeck, and even Virginia Woolf have capitalized on, was Jack London’s The Call of the Wild.
London’s short novel tells the story of Buck, a half-Saint Bernard half-Scotch Collie who is taken away from the easy domestic life he leads in Northern California to work as a sled dog in Alaska during the height of the Klondike Gold Rush. The book made London a world-famous (and very rich) writer soon after it was published in 1903. In the novel, London was able to channel the elemental connection we share with dogs, making us feel Buck’s pangs of hunger and shivers of terror as he learns to fend for himself in the Klondike, discovering how to tap into his primeval bond with his wolf ancestors in order to survive in the wilds of Alaska.
It was no wonder that a book as globally popular as The Call of the Wild should soon be adapted into a film. In fact, two of the most important directors in early American cinema, D.W. Griffith and William Wellman, each filmed a version of the novel. Subsequent adaptations appeared in 1972 (directed by Ken Annakin) and 1976 (a made-for-TV version directed by Jerry Jameson).
Even if we’re overdue for another film version of London’s classic, I was skeptical going into The Call of the Wild, the new, $109 million, CGI-suffused spectacle from director Chris Sanders. But I found much to admire in it, particularly the way Sanders and screenwriter Michael Green foreground the character of Buck. Previous adaptations, such as Wellman’s 1935 version starring Clark Gable and Annakin’s 1972 version starring Charlton Heston, erred severely in making Buck’s owner, the outdoorsman John Thornton, the lead character. It is hard to overstate just how much of a filmic and literary crime this was. Yes, Buck does at one point need to be saved by Thornton from a cruel master, but Thornton is still only an ancillary character. In the novel, which is seven chapters long, he appears midway through Chapter Five and is gone by the beginning of Chapter Seven.
Making Thornton the protagonist is like adapting Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and making the Russian soldiers who eventually liberate the camp the stars of the film. The Call of the Wild is Buck’s story, not Thornton’s, and the new version thankfully restores Buck to his rightful place.
This is a crucial move, because The Call of the Wild is very much a bildungsroman in reverse. It is a story about the growth and education of a rather human-like character, who is taken away from his comfortable home and must gradually unlearn the things that made him civilized in order to develop an entirely new set of skills, which will enable him to survive in the new Hobbesian world in which he finds himself. The new version of Call portrays this learning process quite well, from Buck’s tentative beginnings as a Klondike sled dog, when he literally struggles to find his footing in the Alaskan snow, to his experience of the brutal cold of nights in the Arctic circle, his fierce scuffle with another dog over leadership of the sled team, and his efforts to channel the spirit of his wolf ancestors.
The photography of the Alaskan wilderness is frequently breathtaking, and the interaction between Buck and Thornton (a grizzled, white-bearded, and silver-haired Harrison Ford, playing Thornton with the right mix of rugged stoicism and warmhearted tenderness) is often genuinely moving. The fact that Buck himself is not played by a real dog but is a creation of CGI and motion-capture technology will have many purists bristling. But this technique allows Buck to have a greater range of movement and be exposed to more danger (a theme at the core of London’s novel) without risking injury to a real, flesh-and-blood dog. It’s a tough trade-off, but not a bad one — film technology is now so advanced that only the keenest of viewers will be able to tell that Buck is not a “real” dog. In The Irishman, Martin Scorsese used CGI to make Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro appear younger in lieu of replacing them with 30-year-old actors. Few complained about that, so I don’t see why this should be a problem with The Call of the Wild — especially when it allows the filmmakers to restore Buck to his rightful place as the star of this timeless hero’s journey.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer living in New York, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
