My Dog Skip (2000)

directed by Jay Russell

M.C. Smith

As the film My Dog Skip opens and Harry Connick, Jr. narrates as our elder Willie Morris, waxing and waning about memory and boyhood, the camera lingers on five men in sun hats on a park bench, the one in the middle reading a paper and smoking a cigar. That one in the middle reading the paper and smoking a cigar? That is my father, Sam Ellard Smith, Jr.

My father took me to see My Dog Skip within days of its release in the early months of 2000. The minute the theater darkened and the film began to roll, I launched into hysterics, screaming and crying. To be fair, I was only four. Perhaps this was the beginning of my long tradition of ruining things before they even begin. My father escorted us out of the theater, and we didn’t see the movie together. I don’t think I have ever watched My Dog Skip with my father, though I find that the two have become forever intertwined.

Adapted from the memoir of the same name, My Dog Skip tells the story of the boyhood days of famed writer and lauded Mississippian, Willie Morris, played by a young Frankie Muniz. Raised in the small outer Delta town of Yazoo City in the early 1940s, Willie is a shy, awkward child with few friends. On his ninth birthday, his mother gives him a Jack Russell Terrier, Skip, after witnessing how lonely her son is. Though the film is focused on the relationship between Willie and Skip, and how Skip guides Willie through his boyhood and allows him to open up and form friendships, the film has always fascinated me as a portrait of father and son.

My Dog Skip was shot and filmed in Canton, Mississippi in 1999, back when it was still a movie-making hub and the tax breaks for productions were still unmatched elsewhere. My dad answered a call for extras and won a part as a background actor for the film. It was something he tried to get me to do frequently as I grew up, though I never succeeded. My dad was deeply Mississippi, and I was somehow not, it seemed. I once auditioned for James Franco’s adaptation of The Sound and the Fury, but I didn’t get far without any sort of natural Southern accent.

In My Dog Skip, Jack Morris, played by Kevin Bacon, is a cold, distant father. He is a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, an experience that he refuses to speak about and one that has cost him a leg. As the film opens, an elder Willie narrates, “Sometimes it seemed that, along with that leg, he’d also lost a piece of his heart.” Though he understands his son to be sensitive, Jack is unable to comfort him, or even relate to him. Early in the film, on Willie’s ninth birthday, Jack gives him a stuffed dog that he says was his when he was a boy. In a scene that melts my heart, makes it sticky like chocolate in summer, Willie smiles as best he can and offers up a “Thank you, Daddy. It’s nice.” His father, unsure, smiles too and bows his head. It’s a scene that reveals, to me, Jack’s own softness, but also his deep distance from it. Jack gives his son a toy that mattered to him, and Willie recognizes this attempt, but he has long outgrown stuffed animals. Jack, meanwhile, thinks a special stuffed animal will make up for the fact that he will never let Willie have a dog.

It is a scene that reminds me much of my own father.

My father was born in the small town of Louisville, Mississippi in 1959. He attended Mississippi State University, where he majored in Accounting. He married my mother when he was thirty-five and shortly after took a job with the academic medical center here in Jackson, a place he has worked ever since. As I grew up, we bonded over films, watching classics on TCM together, him telling me stories of when they shot O Brother Where Art Thou and A Time to Kill and Ghosts of Mississippi, which actors he had bumped into in passing. My dad has never been very good at discussing his feelings, but film always seemed to be a way for us to talk. It was something the two of us shared, when no one else in our family paid much attention to the silver screen.

The earliest conflict in My Dog Skip comes from Jack Morris, who thinks his son is still too young to have a dog. Jack takes Skip away immediately after he is presented to Willie at his birthday party, attended sparsely by family, saying, “I’m sorry. Your mother made a mistake.” After the party has ended, Jack explains himself to his wife, played with impossibly good charm by Diane Lane, as she sits on the porch swing with Skip in her lap. “Dogs die, they get sick, they run away from home, they get hit by cars and they’re just a heartbreak waitin’ to happen. Will, he’s not ready for that. He’s frail, he’s sensitive. He can’t handle it.” Diane Lane objects, and as she walks into the house, she steals her husband’s fat cigar. With it in her mouth, she says firmly, “He keeps the dog.”

I think of a story my father told me, of when his family dog, Boo Boo, had pups. The kids named the two of them Howly and Growly. One day, my father was walking to the library, letting the pups trail behind him. “I should’ve known better,” he said. “But I didn’t. We cared for our dogs, but we just let them roam around then, you know?” Howly was hit by a car while following after my father. He still remembers Boo Boo nudging at her puppy with her nose, crying, trying to wake him up.

I wonder occasionally, in my softer moments, if my father and mother were trying to protect me from heartbreak when they refused to let me have a dog. It was something I begged for as a child, patiently writing it down every birthday and Christmas, reading every book on every dog breed in the library. My mother jokes often nowadays, “Remember when we would go to the beach, and you would count all the dogs we saw? Tell us what breed they were?” After repeated replies of “maybe next year,” my parents finally told me at age twelve that we would never be getting a dog. It was out of the question. Surely, an eldest daughter who cried over broken Christmas ornaments wouldn’t be able to handle the weight of a living thing. 

In my colder moments, I think they just didn’t want to deal with the fur.

Throughout the film, I feel a kinship with young Willie Morris and his loneliness, though mine was never sated. I think of my own childhood, solitary and made up of books and Taylor Swift CDs on loop, and wonder what caring for a living thing would have done for me, taught me. Watching Willie Morris grow and explore with his pup, a child with a living creature that he cares for and that loves and adores him, I feel a lump well in my throat. It’s hard not to feel like something was taken from me, hard not to think of all the afternoons and evenings spent alone in my room, and wonder what it would’ve been like had I had the dog I so badly wanted to care for. Willie Morris describes the experience as transformative. How would such an experience have transformed me? What did I lose by never being allowed a childhood dog of my own?

As a child, and as an adult, I have often viewed my father as cold. Emotion makes him deeply uncomfortable, and he prefers to deal with problems logically, one slow step at a time. “I don’t understand why you care about these things,” he says to me often. “I don’t understand why you care what people think.” When I told my father at nineteen that I thought I might be depressed, a possibility I had agonized over after days of being unable to get out of bed, he asked me if I had been exercising, if maybe I should’ve been praying more. It was completely tone deaf advice, but it was offered with such careful sincerity, it was almost impossible to be mad. My dad didn’t have any idea what he was doing either. It was entirely possible, I thought, that my dad was also depressed. He had few friends to speak of. His hobbies had long become memories. He barely slept, staying up late at night on the couch or in his chair, occasionally watching movies but mostly just staring. I knew that his existence was lonely, just as mine was.

There are many scenes in My Dog Skip that tug at the heartstrings. There are many that tug at mine, but, I imagine, other people pay no mind to. One such scene is when Willie and his father and Skip are exploring the forest, looking for blackberries. Jack explains how to mark the trail to find your way back, and Willie finally asks about his father’s leg. Though he still will not admit to how exactly it was lost, Jack Morris does finally admit the phantom pain he often feels. As father and son hear gunshots, taking a knee and making their presence known to the hunters, Willie asks his father if this was what it was like in the war. His father doesn’t answer, but does hold him close. It’s then that the camera slows, and we see a doe wander into frame, still alive and bleeding out from a hunter’s bullet. Willie and Skip run to the doe, mystified. Tears cover Willie’s face as he brushes his fingertips against the bullet wound, watches those same fingertips come away with blood as he says, “Daddy, she’s still alive. Should we call a vet or something?” Blessedly, Willie misses the kill shot, but he does see the aftermath. He knows the doe is dead.

It is in this scene that Jack Morris ceases to be my father, and my father instead becomes young Willie Morris. I think of the baby racoons my father fed on his porch as a child, of the baby squirrel he helped nurse back to health with an eye dropper of milk, of the opossums he watched and cared for as if they were no different than stray cats. I think of all the silly affectionate names for pets, of Howly and Growly, of Boo Boo nudging her dead puppy. I see in Willie Morris my father’s own care for the living thing, my father’s own horror at suffering and death. I see what he wants to protect me from, what he is perhaps still trying to protect me from. 

That day in the theater, when my dad took me to see My Dog Skip at four years old, I don’t know why I screamed. I don’t know why I was unable to behave. I don’t remember if it was my first time in a movie theater, or if I was just in a particularly bad mood that day and made upset by the dimming of the lights and the roar of the surround sound. I don’t think it matters that we never watched the film together, that day or any day after. The fact that I was too emotional for the undertaking has become a story in and of itself, and that seems right. It seems truer to the bond we have with each other than anything else could be, as true as the bond that My Dog Skip immortalizes.

M.C. Smith lives in Mississippi with her three-legged cat, Barry Hannah. Her work has appeared in Autofocus Lit, The Bitter Southerner, and Hobart After Dark. You can find her on Twitter @mistressofcrass, where she shouts into the void about police procedurals and all the weird things men have said to her in bed.