Marley and Me 🎥 2008 Movie Info

Plot Summary

Newlyweds John and Jenny Grogan escape the brutal Michigan winters and relocate to South Florida, each landing reporter jobs at competing newspapers. At The Palm Beach Post, Jenny immediately receives prominent front-page assignments, while at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, John finds himself writing obituaries and mundane two-paragraph news articles. When John senses Jenny is contemplating motherhood, his friend and co-worker, Sebastian Tunney, suggests adopting a dog to test their readiness to raise a family. They choose a yellow Labrador retriever puppy that John names Marley.

After a year, he grows into a big dog and soon proves to be incorrigible, forcing John and Jenny to enroll him in a dog obedience program run by a woman named Ms. Kornblut. Unfortunately, Marley refuses to obey commands and when she blows her whistle, he tackles her and humps her leg, prompting her to kick him out of her class. When they try to take Marley to get neutered, he escapes and runs onto a busy road, almost getting hit by a car. Editor Arnie Klein offers John a twice-weekly column writing anything he likes. Initially stumped for ideas, John realizes that Marley’s misadventures might be the perfect topic for his first column. Arnie loves it, and Marley’s continual wreaking havoc on the household provides John with a wealth of material. The column proves popular with readers and eventually helps double the paper’s circulation.

Meanwhile, Jenny miscarries early in her first trimester, leaving them devastated. Jenny and John have a belated honeymoon in Ireland, leaving Marley at home under a young woman’s care. She cannot control him well, and John and Jenny return to a damaged house. Soon after, Jenny discovers she is pregnant, and nine months later she delivers a healthy boy, Patrick. When a second son, Conor, arrives, Jenny opts to be a stay-at-home mom, so John takes on a daily column for a doubled salary.

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