Movieland’s canon of dog movies is long and varied, from 101 Dalmations and Bolt to The Incredible Journey, Eight Below and Walt Disney’s heart-rending 1950s classic Old Yeller. In Heart of the Beast, Brad Pitt teams up again with director David Ayer, who directed his gritty World War Two Sherman tank movie Fury, and finds a special kind of true love with a lion-hearted German Shepherd called Odin.
Brad plays James Belmont, a US Special Forces veteran who remains battered and bruised from his battlefield experiences. Odin (whose real name is Uber) was a “combat scouting dog” who was by his side through numerous ferocious engagements in what we assume was Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, he’s the closest thing to family that Belmont has left.
We glimpse their wartime experiences in sudden intense flashbacks full of cascading bullets, thundering helicopters and devastating explosions which frequently wake Belmont up in a panic in the middle of the night. But Ayer and screenwriter Cameron Alexander plant the notion that Odin also suffers his own version of shell shock (indeed, canine PTSD is a recognised condition), and he and Belmont are leaning on each other as they try to recuperate and find a peaceful space in the world. The morality of subjecting animals to these experiences does not come up for discussion, though I couldn’t help thinking of the inscription on the Animals in War memorial in London’s Park Lane – “they had no choice”.
Anyway, it all takes them to the stark wildernesses of northern Alaska, where they fly out across balefully beautiful scenery in Belmont’s seaplane to do some fishing and a bit of trail-bashing (in fact it was shot in New Zealand, but director Ayer insists that “you can’t tell the difference”). Odin, despite the fact that his military escapades have left him with one artificial leg, proves to be a dab hand at catching salmon.
The only other human they encounter on their travels is a whiskery old hobo character, played by a barely recognisable JK Simmons, who embodies the film’s call-of-the-wild spirit. He also creates a conversational opportunity which allows Brad to fill in a bit of his back story. However, he missed out the bit about his health problems. These create an existential crisis when he and Odin take to the skies to avoid incoming bad weather, only for Belmont to suffer a mid-flight heart attack.
The pair of them survive this calamity by the skin of their teeth, assisted by some heroics from Odin, but then face the challenge of battling their way across the harsh, predator-infested landscape to try to find safety. Belmont, guzzling handfuls of aspirin to ward off further coronary crises, heroically plunges underwater to rescue as much of their equipment as he can, before the dog-and-man duo set out on what Belmont calculates to be about a 60-mile hike.
Their Jack London-esque odyssey involves confronting a daunting variety of obstacles. A fraught encounter with a treacherous log-bridge across a foaming torrent of water is shot with intimidating vividness, while Odin displays true grit when confronted with a huge and bad-tempered grizzly bear. After they’ve watched a wolf pack mauling an unfortunate elk, they suffer their own ordeal by wolf as the predators subject them to a methodical, coordinated attack.
Through it all, the relationship between man and canine evolves into what feels like a genuine emotional bond. As Pitt has commented, “we’re less alone in the world because of our dogs.” And the on-screen comment by this scarred, solitary man that his relationship with Odin was “the greatest joy of my life” is one of several grab-a-Kleenex moments.
