That allows audiences to project whatever wisdom they please onto the blank-faced animal, while Costner’s voice supplies his personality: earnest, loyal, an old soul in a puppy’s body. The on-screen Enzo is a gorgeous golden retriever, though the attractive-looking movie doesn’t demand much of its dog actors, apart from looking handsome. Faithfully adapting Stein’s well-liked best-seller, screenwriter Mark Bomback maintains the book’s folksy tone, relying more on Enzo’s narration than on conventional dramaturgy to bring the story to life. This movie’s entire raison d’être is to make you cry, and in that respect, novelist Garth Stein piled on nearly every ploy - from Enzo’s death (it’s signaled right there in the opening scene) to a cancer diagnosis to a custody battle to an impossible reunion - to wring tears from his readers.
Director Simon Curtis’ decade-in-the-making “ The Art of Racing in the Rain” is a simple-minded yet skillfully manipulative answer to that question - featuring the bare-feet-in-loose-gravel voice of Kevin Costner as Enzo, the canine companion to Seattle-based race car driver Denny Swift (Milo Ventimiglia) - that’s not as peppy as “A Dog’s Purpose” nor as droll as “Isle of Dogs,” and nowhere near as inane as “Look Who’s Talking Now” but still effective on its own dog-forsaken terms. At some point, pretty much everyone who’s owned a dog has stared into the creature’s soulful brown eyes and wondered what it was thinking.
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