The Friend
Naomi Watts (with an assist from Billy Murray) stars in dog movie that's not really about dogs, but more a heartfelt exploration of grief and regret.
A lot of actors’ careers have gone to the dogs — sometimes quite literally — and many filmmakers still adhere to the old adage, ‘Don’t work with animals or children.’ But Tom Hanks survived “Turner & Hooch,” and Naomi Watts certainly acquits herself well in “The Friend” — a dog movie that’s not really about dogs.
Written and directed by the team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel, adapted from the novel of the same title by Sigrid Nunez, “The Friend” features Watts as Iris, a middle-aged writer/professor grieving the loss of her best friend, Walter, who was older and more accomplished. They briefly were lovers many years ago but managed to keep a true platonic friendship going in the decades since.
Walter died recently after some vaguely referenced downfall, apparently something in the #MeToo vein. He wasn’t a total cad but was certainly of the archaic mold of not seeing much distinction between his personal and professional passions.
Sleeping with students was not unknown; Iris was one and so was his first wife, Elaine (Carla Gugino), who shows up to commiserate. Walter was on his third wife by the time he died.
Walter is played by Bill Murray, and if you’d only seen the marketing for this movie you’d think he is the star. In fact, he’s only in about three significant scenes, and acts more as a ghostly presence for the real center of the show, Iris. The story is not about him, it’s about her and her process of coming to terms with his passing.
This takes the very corporeal form of Apollo, a Great Dane Walter adopted some years ago as a lost animal. The dog was his pride and joy, a massive 150-pound beast of black and white fur and mismatched eyes. Barbara (Noma Dumezweni), his second wife (I think) and caretaker of his affairs, explains to Iris that Walter intended for her to take care of Apollo, even though he did not memorialize that in writing anywhere.
Now, if you’ve seen any movies about people unexpectedly becoming the caretaker of a dog, you can guess everything that will happen next. Iris will refuse the burden, then reluctantly take it on, become exasperated by what’s entailed in caring for such a large animal, feel emotionally burdened by it, face some external threat to the arrangement (in her case, the rules at her New York City apartment building), try to give the dog away, experience a breakthrough moment of tenderness with the animal, and by the end of the film decides she cannot possibly live without Apollo by her side.
My saying all this does not really give anything away. Because “The Friend” follows these expected tropes will subverting them at the same time. Again, it’s not really about the dog.
It’s a very heartfelt, interior performance by Watts, who paints a portrait of a woman deeply impacted by regrets she has barely come to acknowledge. Some are related to her career, which includes some published works but largely subsisting on mentoring aspiring young writers, mostly other women who will become like herself. A notable exception is an utterly crass, clueless dude (Owen Teague) who dismisses his classmates’ sensitive stories and probably will go on to massive success in the Bret Easton Ellis mode.
Of course, Apollo will do comedic canine things like chew up her important papers, need to go to the bathroom at all hours, refuse to use the building elevator so she must trudge up and down the stairs several times a day, hog her bed, and so on. He’ll also stare at her for hours with soulful, knowing eyes.
Complicating things, Iris has been working on a book compiling Walter’s many years of correspondence in conjunction with his daughter, Val (Sarah Pidgeon), whose existence he only learned about a few years ago. Like with Apollo, we get the sense Walter had forcibly paired them together partly out of obligation, but also as a way to coax Iris out of her shell.
That’s the kind of guy he was: doing things for selfish reasons while justifying it as mentoring.
The book’s not coming along so well, the publisher (Josh Pais) is getting impatient, and Iris finds she’d rather write about her own relationship with Walter than curating his letters and emails. The narration more or less plays out as this prose, ostensibly to Apollo — the dog loves to be read to out loud — but really directed inward, to herself.
“What will happen to the dog?” we hear Walter ask, either directly or through quotation several times. He’s also asking about his own legacy, how will he be remembered, will his scandalous end eclipse the life of letters that came before, and so on. He’s also asking this on behalf of Iris — will she be able to come to terms with her own grief and sadness, grow and move on? Or will she require his beyond the grave manipulations?
Most movies of this sort would shoehorn in a third-act serendipitous romance, and I’m glad this one didn’t. Iris is the sort of woman who never really gave a thought to a thing like marriage and children, and the journey she’s on does not depend on some dude’s presence to give it legitimacy.
A four-legged fellow, on the other hand…
When people close to us die, part of us dies, too, whether we want to admit it or not. You’ve heard the saying about the pain is there to remind us of the love it replaced, and I think that’s on the nose. “The Friend” is an emotionally true tale about a person trudging from bad to better.
The dog is just the MacGuffin.