Lasse Hallström’s Hachi: A Dog’s Tale asks its audience to believe that a dog can love a man past death. It earns that belief slowly, then spends it all at once.
Trailer, via SonyPicturesDVD.
A Puppy on the Platform in Bedridge
The film is a 2009 American remake of Seijirō Kōyama’s 1987 Japanese film Hachikō Monogatari, which told the true story of an Akita named Hachikō who lived in Japan from 1923 to 1935. Hallström’s version moves the tale to a modern American setting. Richard Gere plays Parker Wilson, a professor who commutes to Providence, Rhode Island, and finds a lost Akita puppy at the railway station in Bedridge. He takes the dog home. No one claims it.
Parker’s wife Cate, played by Joan Allen, objects at first. She warms to Hachi eventually, but the dog sleeps outside in his own shed. Their daughter Andy is played by Sarah Roemer. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa plays Ken, Parker’s Japanese friend, who identifies the breed and reads the character on the collar tag: “Hachi,” or eight in Japanese. Parker keeps the name. Eight is a lucky number.
The Ball He Would Not Chase
Ken tells Parker that Akita dogs cannot be trained to fetch. If Hachi ever retrieves a ball, Ken says, it will be for a special reason. Parker tries anyway and fails.
The dog has other ideas about routine. Hachi digs under the fence and follows Parker to the station. Parker misses his train, hands the dog to Cate, and catches the next one. At 5:00 pm he steps off the train and finds Hachi waiting. The dog came alone. So begins the daily walk: to the station in the morning, home, then back at 5:00 pm to meet the train.
- Parker Wilson, the professor who finds the puppy
- Cate Wilson, his wife, who resists and then relents
- Andy, their daughter, who marries Michael and later announces a pregnancy
- Ken, who names the breed and explains what the dog will not do
- Hachi, the Akita who learns the 5:00 pm train
One Morning, the Trick Arrives
One morning Hachi behaves strangely. He follows Parker to the station carrying the ball. Parker throws it, and Hachi fetches it for the first time. They play. Then Parker pockets the ball and starts to leave.
The scene works because of its shape: the one trick the dog was never supposed to learn arrives on the one morning it should not have. Hallström stages it plainly, without music swelling the moment into a demand. That restraint is the film’s best quality.
Ronnie Tells the Class
The frame is a boy at a school desk. Ronnie, Parker’s grandson, tells his class that his personal hero is his grandfather’s dog. The narration is thin, a device to open a door rather than a story of its own, and the film never returns to the classroom with anything to say.
The cast around Gere is capable but underused. Jason Alexander plays Carl. Erick Avari plays Jasjeet. Davenia McFadden plays Mary Anne. Robbie Sublett plays Michael. These are names doing the work of people, and the script rarely lets them.
How the Film Reached Audiences
Hachi: A Dog’s Tale premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival on June 13, 2009. Its first theatrical release came in Japan on August 8, 2009. Entertainment Film Distributors gave it a UK release on March 12, 2010, and it opened in more than 60 countries across 2009 and 2010. By the end of September 2010, foreign box office returns had passed $45 million.
Sony Pictures Entertainment skipped a U.S. theatrical release. The film came out on DVD on March 9, 2010, and later went to the Hallmark Channel, where it debuted on September 26, 2010. That distribution history tells you what the studio thought of its American prospects. The film runs 93 minutes and was written by Stephen P. Lindsey and Kaneto Shindo.
The tagline promises “a true story of faith, devotion and undying love.” The devotion is real and the dog is the reason. What the film lacks is nerve: it trusts the true story so completely that it never argues with it. A 93-minute runtime is short enough that the long middle of walks and trains starts to feel like padding rather than patience.
Rotten Tomatoes puts the film at 64%.
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