Mine

Mine

80 Minutes

Mine is about a number of people from New Orleans whose pets were displaced from them by Hurricane Katrina. Their ongoing efforts to be reunited with them, and the efforts of a number of volunteers to help facilitate that, are at the center of this movie. All of these pets have, in the time since the disaster, wound up at animal shelters all across the country and been adopted by other families. This is one of the central conflicts that many of these pet owners face in trying to get them back. Jesse had a dog named Max adopted by a family in Florida, who renamed him Joey. Jesse is obviously screwed up by this turn of events, but more evidently, Max’s adoptive family’s thrown for a loop by the new development, as well. For the majority of the movie, the matriarch of the house tries a whole slew of different logical contortions on for size, various insubstantial rationalizations about the dog being happier with them, to justify the fact that she is, in substance though not in intent, a dog thief.

It’s all made even stranger by the fact that many Katrina pets were given a stay of death against the usual five-day period most dogs are given at animal shelters. All of these pets have been shuffled around and kept alive since the hurricane hit; whether they’re being as scrupulously handled as they can be is another story. Jesse and a few other owners are adamant that their dogs had tags with contact information around their necks the whole time. Not only have they not been contacted, but when they eventually track down their pets to the shelters they were released from, they’re not given any means to contact the new owners – the shelters often won’t even reach out to them on their original owners’ behalf, partially due to policy, but also due sometimes to a suspicion of negligence that a lot of the owners have to endure, the question of how they could have abandoned their pets seems to supersede that of how they got separated from them while dealing with the pandemonium of evacuating a city facing imminent destruction. Linda, for example, is unable to get her dog back because the new owners think she abandoned it. She maintains, pretty plausibly, that her car was only able to fit her (human) family and their belongings, it’s one person’s presumption against another one’s word.

It’s an interesting predicament, and an interesting opportunity to maybe also explore the ways that people project their own feelings or desires upon their pets. At the end, when Jesse gets Max back, the argument his new owner made earlier about the dog being happier with them is not only refuted, in a sense, but the foundation for the argument itself is nullified altogether – there is no discernible difference in the dog’s body language at all; can he really tell one bit? Similarly, Linda’s argument that she couldn’t fit her dog in her car is fair, but if it had been her grandmother, maybe she would have laid across people’s laps in the back seat, instead of being left in the house. There is a hierarchy in place, and no matter how much a pet is “part of the family,” it’s the first thing to go if survival is at stake. This isn’t to say that the new family is justified in essentially kidnapping her dog – which to my mind is what any of the families who know about the original owners are doing – but it does stand to show that the self-righteousness with which the sanctity of a pet-owning family can be pursued in times of comfort doesn’t translate wholly to the way they’ll act in the face of mortal peril.

These questions are there, inherently, as part of the subject matter, but they’re nowhere to be found in the movie itself. In fact, I’d argue that this review, in condensing the movie’s concept and narrative thrust, isn’t effectively that much less of an experience than seeing the film itself. I guess I don’t understand what some of these documentarians are hoping to accomplish when they set out to make a movie instead of just trying to work for PBS or the news or something. Maybe it’s the same thing to them, but it’s not to me and it’s not to my 10 dollars, either. The only really discernible point of view contained in the film is that this situation is a bummer and hopefully these people can get their dogs back. Right on; but adorable 76-year-old Malvin, pining for his beloved poodle, Bandit, is still living in a FEMA trailer at the end of this film, despite the happy reunion. I dunno, it’s not my place to say, I guess, if it makes a person happy, but this movie shows a slew of volunteers calling animal shelters all day, and it makes me wonder what else they could be doing with their time. Anyway, that’s not an idea that’s contained within this movie, it’s seriously not even addressed, so whatever. If the general concept behind this movie seems appealing to you, then maybe you’ll like watching it.

by Andrei Alupului