Producers: Liza Chasin, Scott McGehee, David Siegel and Mike Spreter Directors: Scott McGehee and David Siegel Screenplay: Scott McGehee and David Siegel Cast: Naomi Watts, Bill Murray, Sarah Pidgeon, Carla Gugino, Constance Wu, Noma Dumezweni, Ann Dowd, Josh Pais, Felix Solis, Owen Teague, Tom McCarthy, Juliet Brett, Gina Costigan and Bruce Norris Distributor: Bleecker Street
Grade: B-
The writing-directing team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel have made a string of interesting if not always successful films, from “Suture” (1994) through “Montana Story” (2021), often adapting unlikely sources (like Henry James’s “What Maisie Knew”) in the process. Their inspiration in this case is the 2018 novel by Sigrid Nunez, whose 2020 book “What Are You Going Through” was recently adapted by Pedro Almodóvar as “The Room Next Door.”
Both are about end-of-life issues, and both involve suicide. “Room” focuses on a terminally-ill woman and the old friend she enlists to help her die with dignity. “The Friend” deals with the aftermath of an unexpected suicide, specifically the grief that follows it. There’s also the not-so-small matter of a Great Dane left behind mourning its deceased master.
Naomi Watts stars as Iris, the friend and disciple of the dead man, Walter (Bill Murray), an author and university professor who’s gotten into professional trouble because of his womanizing habits, including entanglements with students. Iris is a writer herself, though she’s set aside work on her novel to concentrate on editing a collection of Walter’s letters for his publisher Jerry (Josh Pais).
Now she’s shattered by Walter’s suicide and by the request from his widow Barbara (Noma Dumezweni) that she take charge of Apollo, the huge dog that her late husband had adopted after finding it abandoned during one of his jogs along the coast. Iris reluctantly agrees, though she intends housing the animal only until she can find somewhere else for it, be it a private home or a shelter. Doing so is important, not only because Apollo, though extraordinarily well-mannered in terms of barking, is far too large for her apartment, but because the building, as super Hektor (Felix Solis), a friendly sort but duty-bound, informs her repeatedly, does not allow dogs. Keeping the animal could result in her eviction from the rent-controlled flat, which she inherited from her recently-deceased father—another loss she’s still processing.
Iris’s search for a place for Apollo continues as she effectively surrenders her place, including her bed, to the animal, which she finds can be destructive unless soothed—in its case, she discovers, by being read to. In the meantime she has to deal with Jerry, whose interest in the completion of the book of Walter’s letters grows; with Walter’s two divorced ex-wives Elaine (Carla Gugino) and Tuesday (Constance Wu); with Val (Sarah Pidgeon), his grown daughter from some long-ago affair who comes as a surprise to everyone but proves helpful to Iris; and with Marjorie (Ann Dowd), a supportive neighbor who’d been close to her father but is, of course, allergic to dogs. She also has to keep up with her university writing seminar, where the only guy in the class (Owen Teague, from “Montana Story”) complains of having to tamp down the erotic prose he reads to the class, but on learning of Apollo calls the Great Dane “the king of dogs.”
But wearing the canine crowd does not, as a vet (Bruce Norris) explains, bring longevity. The breed has a short life expectancy, and Apollo might be nearing the end of his days. As Iris predictably grows more and more connected emotionally with the animal—they share grief over Walter’s loss, after all—she becomes increasingly protective of it. The dog, played by a canine named Bing whose bearing, as lovingly shot by cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, reflects Murray’s majestically hangdog look, is a sort of surrogate for its dead master in her eyes, and she simply can’t deal with the thought of handing it off to somewhat else. That, of course, is a sign of her deep attachment to the dead man with whom, it’s eventually revealed, she once had a sexual encounter herself. With the help of her therapist (Tom McCarthy) she devises a means of keeping the dog and her apartment, too.
There’s so much that’s good about “The Friend”—the performances, especially Watts’s and Murray’s (limited to only a few scenes, including an extended, and overly on-the-nose, imagined conversation toward the close) and Nuttgens’ cinematography, Kelly McGehee’s production design and Stacey Battat’s costumes, which together capture the ambience of literary, academic New York City perfectly—that its flaws are all the more regrettable. They generally have to do with its pacing, which is frankly lethargic. The directors and editor Isaac Hagy were perhaps too attached to their project and its thematic undercurrents to realize that the resultant film—which only a bit longer than two hours—feels much longer. Their concluding shot, moreover, softens Nunez’s more unforgiving ending.
On the other hand, the use of music—not only the background score by Jay Wadley and Trevor Gureckis but the choice of needle drops—adds nice touches, not only in fairly obvious ways (“Everybody’s Talkin’” as Iris and Apollo navigate the city streets) but in the employment of Mozart (mostly “Die Zauberflöte”) in the early going. It’s only a bit of a stretch to hear that as a nod to the increasingly common interpretation of Alfonso’s setting the plot of “Così fan tutte” in motion to “correct” the couples by reversing their linkages; here the implication is that Walter specified the “adoption” of Apollo by Iris as a means of not just assuaging their common grief but of filling what he saw as a void in her life, a posthumous act of friendship.
In other words, “The Friend” is a girl-and-her-dog story, but it’s much more than that; and though it can feel ponderous at times, it’s worth putting up with the longueurs and occasional missteps to embrace its deeper subtleties.