‘The Call of the Wild’ Might Even Rival The Epic ‘Tall Tale’

The first thing we did Friday morning was telephone our brother. He is a logger who, at the age of 72, is still out in the woods with a chain saw and his 14-wheel log truck that is, for Paul Bunyan’s ox, painted blue and named “Babe.” He said he was floating a stack.* Skip breakfast, we told him, and get down to the Bijou to see “Call of the Wild.” It’s the best movie we’ve seen in years, we allowed.“Better’n ‘Tall Tale’?” he asked.We paused. It is true that the ending of “Tall Tale” is unlikely ever to be surpassed. The movie tells of how a boy named Daniel Hackett saves his father’s ranch from railroaders. He does it with the help of Bunyan, John Henry, and Calamity Jane, as well as Pecos Bill. In the final scene, Pecos bestows his famous Friesian — Widowmaker — on Hackett. Then Pecos lassos a tornado and rides it off into the sky.It’s breathtaking cinema — probably the only footage ever captured of a man roping a tornado and getting astride it. Yet reflecting on my brother’s question, I realized that there’s a flaw in “Tall Tale.” It’s the blasted complexity of the plot. “Macbeth,” “Lear,” and those guys have nothing on “Tall Tale.” How, though, is a man supposed to follow all those twists? It might be possible for a youngster. For a man, difficult.“Call of the Wild,” in contrast, has no plot that a grownup could fail to follow. It’s just about a dog named Buck, who is spirited from his urban life by dognappers intent on taking him to the Yukon to sell him to prospectors needing hefty hounds to pull their sleds. Buck escapes, and ends up pulling a mail sled 500 miles north to Dawson, while fending off wolves and saving other dogs and humans.In Dawson, one might imagine, Buck is going to encounter the loving owners from whom he was dognapped back in civilization. That, though, probably never occurred to Jack London, who wrote the immortal novel on which the movie is based. London, it turns out, was something of a lug nut, who was given over to every political enthusiasm of his day, from socialism to eugenics.None of that, though, shows up in “Call of the Wild.” It is blessedly untarnished by politics, the #metoo movement, environmentalism, global warming, and the like. Jack London, it turns out, did see deeper stuff. Buck is rescued from the sled of a cruel owner by none other than Harrison Ford, who plays the aging prospector who’d gone north because he didn’t want to be around anyone.So he and Buck head out into the wilderness, where an astonishing thing happens. Buck begins to find himself. The moviegoer begins to comprehend that Buck isn’t going to bump into his original owners. They are not coming north to look for him. This isn’t Dickens. It’s Jack London. Buck falls for a beautiful wolf and takes off for where he is meant to be, chasing rabbits, butterflies, and the Northern Lights.As our wife and we left the theater, we remarked that it was just incredible how the movie makers managed to train that dog and photograph him in so many hair-raising situations — and how Buck’s face would flicker with almost human expressions (the cock of an eyebrow or the hint of a smile). My wife explained that Buck was actually a computer-generated animation.“That’s what the critics claimed about Pecos Bill,” we said.________* Laying breakfast by floating a stack of flapjacks in a bowl of maple syrup.

‘The Call of the Wild’ Might Even Rival The Epic ‘Tall Tale’

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