My Life as a Dog
In my book, “My Life as a Dog” seems to be the perfect predecessor to “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”. In both cases we are dealing with a child who is not exactly in the happiest family conditions, in both cases he is having a hard life for one reason or another; and a certain degree of mental challenge is involved in there as well.
Not too surprisingly, the feeling “My Life as a Dog” gave me turned out to be very similar to “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”, I find both of the films nice but not much more. On top of that, a certain suburban depression lies upon both films. In “Gilbert Grape”, the performance of the two main characters is outstanding whereas nobody really shines in this film. Compared to that, “My Life as a Dog” is nicer when it comes to the story-telling style in general – it took me a little while to get into it, but when Ingemar started living with his uncle and met all those strange and slightly quirky people, especially Saga, I warmed up to their “small Swedish village” lives.
Ultimately, there is not very much to say about this film except that it is a little boring, not exactly pretty yet strangely interesting. It’s one of those underdog films I usually don’t like too much, but in this case I felt good about the slice-of-life character the film turned into, and the sweet ending.