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.

If Jenny, the no-nonsense household boss, is mercifully forgiving and appealingly curvaceous, beneath her surface perkiness she is awfully dull; early on, the movie conveniently forgets she is a journalist. Mr. Wilson’s John verges on stupefied. His vague, drawling passive-aggression and dazed chipmunk smile are not traits usually associated with an aspiring hard-news journalist who finds his niche writing a humorous column about his incorrigible dog.

The movie implies a rivalry between John and Sebastian (Eric Dane), his best friend at the newspaper, but makes sure that the slick, preening Sebastian comes across as a toxic bachelor not worth envying. As John’s gruff editor with a heart of gold, Alan Arkin serenely works his familiar curmudgeonly shtick.

In the 2005 book, the rearing of an untrained but unfailingly loyal pet, who John likes to boast is “the world’s worst dog,” is portrayed as a relationship in which Marley teaches his master valuable life lessons. These include tolerating frustration and remembering to live in the moment while building a family — wisdom not conveyed by the movie.

Marley enters the Grogans’ household as a test case for actual parenthood. In his first act of vandalism he tears up their garage. The first signs that he is untrainable come when an imperious dog trainer (Kathleen Turner) abruptly rejects him after he refuses to obey, and a potentially uproarious comic encounter between human and beast is thrown away.

Mildly diverting scenes of canine misbehavior crop up at regular intervals, but the film makes little of them. After Marley’s failure at dog-training school, he is pretty much allowed to destroy at his leisure while his owners express amused exasperation. The deepening emotional bond between the Grogans and Marley is simply taken for granted.

Although the scenes between Mr. Wilson and the 22 dogs that play Marley at different ages demonstrate affection between owner and pet, nobody in the movie, including the Grogan children, seems deeply, wrenchingly attached to any other creature. Life is lived more habitually than passionately.

That doesn’t mean the scenes of Marley’s final days and the family’s mourning over his death aren’t affecting. Of course they are. But at the end of “Marley & Me” you don’t leave the theater with a sense that anything much has been learned, only that a fixture in the Grogans’ comfortable suburban lives has been removed. They will get over the loss in no time.