John is crisp, focused, professional, and sometimes sarcastic. “I’m sure it’s worth the six-hour round trip just to see 4,000 strangers dressed in the same outfit,” he says when Fielding shows up after the ceremony. He tells Fielding he does not have the time or responsibility for a pet, and when Fielding insists, John tries to put Gonker in a shock collar to keep him from leaving their property.
Fielding does yoga and loves to wander around the outdoors. He wears shorts and a shell necklace. He turns down his father’s offers to set him up for job interviews. He is devastated when he overhears his father describing the contrast between them. “I always knew he was disappointed in me, but this time he seemed embarrassed,” he admits. Meanwhile, he does not tell anyone about some troubling symptoms he is experiencing.
On the Appalachian Trail, Fielding and his best friend Nate (the endearingly wry Nick Peine of “A.P. Bio”) let Gonker run after a fox and they become separated. John drops everything and promises they will find Gonker and bring him home. Fielding’s mother, Ginny (Kimberly Williams-Paisley), sets up a command center at the house with fax machines and phone books (“I’m analog!” she says), fliers, and one of those maps with red yarn connecting the various locations. For morale, she posts a “hero list” of all the people helping. The search is especially urgent because there are only 19 days until Gonker must have medication for Addison’s disease.
As aww-inspiring as the human and dog moments in the movie are, it is the human encounters along the search that are the heart of the film. For Ginny, helping to find Gonker is a way to help resolve the pain she still feels over the Akita she lost as a child. For John and Fielding, it is a way to learn what they have to learn from one another, to discover what they have in common, partly through the encounters they have along the way. Over and over again, they get unexpected support from people they would never otherwise meet, from a man at a gas station who sells them a figure of the patron saint of lost souls to a group of bikers and a sympathetic reporter, many who also have dogs they love. John and Ginny demonstrate what “hard work and calculated, deliberate decisions”—and the kind of resources that pay for a big house and enable the family to take a month off—can accomplish. Most important, as it usually is, is what John communicates simply by being there, showing Fielding what responsibility and commitment means to a father. “You worry about Gonker because you love him, and he’s lost. That’s why I worry about you.”
