It takes a certain type of person to have a dog in New York City, let alone a 180lb, questionably behaved one. Iris, played with a natural grace by Naomi Watts in The Friend, is not that type of person. She is a mostly solitary writer in a small – at least, to the eyes of her more accomplished peers – apartment in the West Village, whose schedule is at the whims of her teaching work and sputtering attempts at a novel. She has settled into an independent rhythm of middle-aged singledom in the city. Also, she prefers cats. Nevertheless, she finds herself caring for Apollo, her late best friend Walter’s (Bill Murray) beloved great dane, after his suicide.
The Friend, a slight and tender-hearted adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s bestselling 2018 novel, opens with the scene of an abandoned Apollo’s fateful meeting with Walter in Brooklyn Bridge Park. It’s love at first sight, a story he evidently relishes at a dinner party that suggests a rich (in all the ways) life of books, hearty wine and writerly community. The two-hour film, written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, summarily jumps to the present, where Iris finds herself as a reluctant node within a thorny network of women grieving Walter’s death – one current wife (Noma Dumezweni) and two former (Constance Wu and Carla Gugino), as well as a recently un-estranged adult daughter named Val (Sarah Pidgeon), with whom Iris is compiling a book of Walter’s correspondence.
Walter left behind a lot of questions, some specific and some universal to the long wake of suicide. Why did he do it? Was he not thinking of his loved ones? What to do with his 30,000 emails? (Also, why are all these decades-younger women devoted to him? Why does Iris love him so? One wonders, based on the questions asked of Iris and one key revelation, if Walter, who could easily be mistaken for Iris’s father, should have been played by an actor closer to Watts’ age.) And most pressingly for Iris: what will happen to the dog?
Iris wonders this several times, in voiceover that threads throughout the narrative, to occasionally resonant, often cheesy effect. It’s a fitting question for a film interested in both the practical, black humor-filled aftermath of the suicide, and a heartfelt tale of healing. The Friend, which played at the New York film festival, handles one of those much more smoothly than the other. This is a soft version of the novel, sanding down its acerbic observations of self-absorbed writers – and Iris’s concerns about her friend’s proclivity to sleep with his younger female students – into a more straightforwardly commercial, and genuinely emotional, tale of unlikely companionship.
Apollo is not, at the outset, a very good boy. He refuses to eat, balks at Iris’s elevator, and takes over her bed. When he’s not destroying Iris’s apartment, he’s flopped over, staring laconically into space. The dog, played by a dane named Bing in the best canine screen performance since Messi in Anatomy of a Fall, is clearly grieving its owner, in contrast to the emotionally stifled, bitter or resentful group of humans reckoning with Walter’s suicide without tears. Iris is avoiding grieving her friend. Obviously, they will fall for each other – especially once Iris realizes that the thing Apollo loves the most is to be read Walter’s words.
You’d have to have a hard heart not to be moved by Apollo’s droopy-eyed, grief-stricken stare, nor the pair’s scenes together in Iris’s apartment, as Iris begins calling him “bud” and Apollo essentially becomes her giant dog-shaped body pillow. Watts, especially shines in these moments of dog-human mind-meld, as the two attract attention – he resembles, as one puts it, a pony – and become increasingly open and dependent with the other. It can be borderline maudlin and easily teary, though The Friend is grounded enough, and Watts sufficiently understated, to not become outright eye-rolling.
Still, the film is a tonal jumble – part relationship tangle, part dark comedy, part vague reckoning with the sins of an older man – that never truly coheres as a human drama; you can imagine Walter critiquing several of the side characters in this movie – Iris’s sexist male student (Owen Teague), Wu’s rich and narcissistic second wife, Iris’s sweetly concerned neighbor Marjorie (Ann Dowd, doing the most with a little) – as a little too on the nose. But it succeeds when it boils down to its two main characters – a sweet, naturalistic tale of this odd couple who learn to adore each other, with a few montages that feel fully out of a dog adoption ad.
Early in the movie, Teague’s student theorizes that no one wants to read a story about an ordinary woman. The Friend, at its best, quietly refutes this – that the story of an ordinary woman, and a very noticeable dog, is worthy of attention, and can transcend the unremarkable rest.
