Marley & Me

To watch “Marley & Me,” the bland, obsequious adaptation of John Grogan’s best-selling memoir of his up-and-down relationship with an unruly Labrador retriever, is to tune in to an era that seems so close and yet so distant. In those naïve old days — the 1990s through the first part of this century — Florida real estate boomed, newspapers flourished and the heavens rained money.

Because the movie, directed by David Frankel (“The Devil Wears Prada”), plays by the rules of Hollywood, John and Jenny Grogan (Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston), never age. The Grogans, golden-fleeced journalists, move from Kalamazoo, Mich., to West Palm Beach, Fla., where they adopt a yellow Lab that John names Marley (after Bob). Except for the occasional thunderstorm that freaks out the neurotic dog, the weather in Florida is always sunny with low humidity.

Later in the movie, after nearly a decade and a half have passed and the Grogans and their three model children have moved to a greeting-card perfect stone house with a barn in rural Pennsylvania, the years seem not to have touched them. Mr. Wilson’s blond surfer locks remain unflecked with gray. The waistline of Ms. Aniston’s Jenny, after bearing three children, shows no sign of a bulge.

Although the Grogans have their spats, one of which drives John temporarily out of the house, the screenplay glosses over their domestic crises to convey the fantasy of a marriage that is mostly smooth sailing, save for Jenny’s exhaustion after the birth of their third child. (The possibility of post-partum depression is cautiously broached, then dropped as though too hot to handle.) Most of the time the Grogans get along fine, largely because John is a laid-back dude verging on a doormat. As for the couple’s romantic chemistry, there is plenty of cuddling but little heat.