Who’s a good movie? And so handsome! The documentary Pick of the Litter follows five puppies in the Guide Dogs for the Blind program from birth to career assignment. Do you really need any more details? It’s big-eyed, faithful, obedient and practically immune to conventional critical faculties. It may be best for viewers to simply roll over and wait for its belly rub to turn your slight contentment into a big tail-wagging grin.
Yet these are not just bundles of helpless, furry cuteness. The movie opens with testimonials from blind people whose guide dogs have helped them achieve a measure of independence in their lives, and have even saved them from danger. In one example, we hear the story of a guide dog that led its owner down 78 flights of steps after the World Trade Center was hit on 9/11.
Such animal heroism in the face of tragedy sets up the movie’s structure–so cuddly and so life-saving! As they suckle at their mother’s teats, the five diminutive candidates first warm our hearts. The filmmakers milk viewer sentiment in ways that only the most cold-hearted can resist. For one thing, they use a cute graphic to chart the progress of the prospective guide dogs, named Patriot, Phil, Potomac, Poppet and Primrose. When one dog is eliminated from the program (euphemistically, they are “career-changed,” which just means that they become ordinary pets, or, in some cases, go into the guide dogs breeding program), the dog is unceremoniously erased from the progress chart. (As David Letterman used to plead during his “Stupid Pet Tricks” segment: please, no wagering.)
But the innocent, playful would-be-professionals aren’t the only stories invested with drama. The puppies are taken in by volunteers who raise and train the animals, forming attachments to them even though they know they will have to give them up at the end of the program—or sooner, if training doesn’t work out. At regular intervals throughout the program, the dogs are evaluated for progress, as well as their trainers, which range from a high school student who’s a relative newcomer to the program to an older couple trying to fill a void in their empty nest. Somebody is going to cry when they have to send their doggie to another trainer.
Much like a Rocky movie, you shouldn’t count out the underdog, as the dogs that seem doomed to fall out of the program may end up surprising you. There’s no equivalent of Burgess Meredith character coaching Primrose to chase the chicken, and such training details would have been welcome. You see behavioral improvement over intervals but you don’t see what led to that improvement, which might be helpful for audiences struggling to teach their pet not to bark so much at the feral cats in the yard, much less save its owner from oncoming traffic. But that’s a minor quibble.
Co-directors Dana Nachman and Don Hardy are veteran journalists who spent years working for the NBC television affiliate in San Francisco, and if their movie comes off like a feature-length expansion of nightly news human-interest stories, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Pick of the Litter delivers exactly what it promises; it doesn’t deserve a treat for that – it is a treat.
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