A film based loosely on a real-life dog famous for waiting years for a dead master does not sound like a good time. Do you even have a reason to watch, or is knowing that it exists enough? Well, its continued presence on IMDb's top 250 told me to check it out.
The most obvious departure from the truth lies in the setting: The real Hachiko lived in Japan in the 1920s and '30s, not some unidentified corner of the U.S. in the '90s and 2000s. In this telling, an Akita puppy gets shipped from Japan and breaks loose in a train station. The next human he meets, dance instructor Parker Wilson (Richard Gere), decides to take care of him temporarily, but the rightful owner never calls and Parker learns to love Hachi enough that Mrs. Wilson (Joan Allen) gives up on finding a substitute. The occasional narrator is Parker's grandson (Kevin DeCoste), now a preteen, who doesn't remember Hachi personally but deems the dog his hero.
Understandably, more than half the movie has nothing to do with Hachi's claim to fame. It's largely a miniseries of episodes about interactions between him and especially Parker. One example, an incident with a skunk, serves no discernible purpose except an excuse to show the duo bathing together (which would've looked less awkward in Japan).
As I touched on in the first sentence, those who know anything about the basis for the story know that Parker is doomed from the start. But director Lasse Hallström (who incidentally did another movie that doesn't end well for a dog) doesn't bother with foreshadowing herein, apart from the train station being the site of both the first meeting and the fateful waiting. Parker's fatal aneurysm seems to come out of nowhere; as such, it feels forced for the sake of some measure of fidelity.
For that matter, so does another faithful aspect: Hachi's name. It's on a collar he comes with, albeit without any contact information. Parker happens to have a Japanese friend, Ken (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), who identifies the character as the word for "eight" and explains the superstition of good luck behind it. As far as we know, Ken never adds the "-ko" part, but at least one of the Wilsons thinks to do so.
If I gained any useful knowledge besides that vocabulary lesson, it's about the Akita breed -- fairly cute but apparently not "good" dogs in most regards. Hachi takes forever to learn to fetch, is too destructive to stay in the house, and always gets past the fence in order to spend as much time with Parker as possible. (The Wilsons don't have the heart to leash him at home.) The one virtue he's bred for is loyalty. No wonder it becomes the focus of his life.
Thankfully, the film does prove effective at pulling heartstrings in a welcome way. I've come to notice a pattern to what makes fictional tragedy beautiful instead of ugly: good people. Not a single character in H:ADT comes across as a jerk, let alone an antagonist. Several people who work at or near the train station (including Jason Alexander, Erick Avari, and Davenia McFadden -- huh, more diversity than I expected) grow fond of Hachi and, through him, Parker. When only Hachi remains, they keep him fed, with a surprising number of contributions after the news covers him.
The presentation is simple enough that I assume the makers had families with young children in mind. Obviously, you have to make sure your kids can sit through prolonged melancholy without objection and accept a bittersweet ending. I'm not convinced that we can learn a useful moral from Hachi, but at least we can share a good cry/sigh. Maybe the real appeal stems from how people across cultures and generations can relate to an animal who does not accept the hopelessness of permanent loss.
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