You might have to be a dog lover to truly engage and “get” “The Friend,” a melancholy meditation on suicide, loss, character and our obligations to someone who has killed himself. And if you’re unsure about the depth of your connection to canines, there’s a scene early on in this downbeat dramedy that reunites “St. Vincent” stars Naomi Watts and Bill Murray that is your yardstick.
It’s the moment frustrated and “blocked” writer Iris meets the dog belonging to her late mentor, the famous writer Walter, who has just taken his own life.
Walter’s widow (Noma Dumezweni) has consigned the animal to a boarding kennel, talked up his civilized manners and good behavior, and played the “Walter wanted” “his best friend” to have Apollo card more than once.
Iris can’t have a dog in her rent-controlled apartment. She never knew Walter had a dog, something “his best friend” would have heard about. But Walter’s messy personal life — two ex-wives (Constance Wu and Carla Gugino), that widow, and a daughter (Sarah Pidgeon) who wasn’t the child of any of them — kind of explains that.
Iris might not even be a “dog person” herself. But she figures the widow’s something of a dog hater, even if she doesn’t guess that she lied about Apollo’s calm, apartment-friendly demeanor and probably made up the whole “Walter wanted you” to have the dog edict.
It’s not like that was in a suicide note.
And she should be insulted by the what widow Barbara figures were Walter’s “reasons” for wanting her to have the dog — “You don’t have kids or a partner” and her “job,” which isn’t going all that well, isn’t anything one couldn’t fit a dog into.
Still, all these other people the dog could go to, and “Walter wanted you” to have him?
But at the kennel, Iris sees what we see — a forlorn look in Apollo’s eyes. He is lost, bereft. The dog (named Bing) lets us in for that incredibly moving moment, and several almost-as-moving ones to follow.
That voice-over journal Iris keeps in her head ponders the imponderable in this.
“How can you explain death to a dog?”
“The Friend,” based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez, is about Iris coping with this enormous burden dropped into a life by a woman the viewer keeps hoping she’ll tell off, thanks to a dead guy who could also use a good dressing-down.
Did I mention the dog’s a Great Dane? He’s big enough to take over most apartments, even a roomy one that one and all describe to Iris as “tiny,” a flat she inherited from her father.
Co-writer/directors Scott McGeHee and David Siegel (“What Maise Knew” was theirs) deliver the obligatory big-dog-stuffed-into-a-small-dogless-life scenes — wrecking the apartment, taking ownership of the furniture. But the comedy here is in this is in the closed ecosystem of New York publishing, in the privileged writer-sentenced-to-academia teaching indulged, privileged students, younger reflections of herself, and in the “messy” love life of a writer-professor whom we soon learn slept with his students, in addition to the three wives he tallied.
Gugino is the long-divorced sage among the three wives, and even she is shocked to learn Walter has an adult daughter, one who joins Iris in the assignment of organizing and editing Walter’s correspondence — letters and emails — into a book. Wu is a hoot as “the irritating one,” the one the others don’t trust, even if she pays lip service to wanting the dog.
Josh Pais plays Walter’s faintly insufferable publisher, who wants that letters book finished, and who insists on reading pretentious poems at Walter’s funeral service and a later memorial scattering of the ashes.
Watts’ Iris copes with the rising threat of eviction, with efforts to “surrender the dog” to a Great Dane rescue group and with being “stuck” as she muses, in voice-over, about Walter, what he was like, what he was to her and what he had in mind sentencing her to take care of his dog.
It’s all a tad airless and comfortable, a tale too obsessed with its “Manhattan upper class problems” (beach houses, rented river tour boats, getting that “next book” out) to come to grips with the big theme hanging over all this.
The annoying aspiring writer college kids and even the Walter flashbacks and imagined “closure” encounters feel more like distractions than keys to the story.
Great Danes, like other very large dogs, don’t live long, Iris learns. What life, art and career lessons might Walter be passing on from beyond the grave by leaving stuck, blocked and yet comfortable Iris with this gigantic physical and emotional burden?
I liked the small moments of New Yorkers/Greenwich Villagers trying to hide their dismay, pity or amusement at the sight of the slight woman trying to get the big dog into an elevator or through a revolving door in a city that may be a lot more dog tolerant than it once was, but still is no place for a Great Dane.
“You must like’em big!”
I like the women’s world this picture creates, with Sue Jean Kim cast as a Columbia U. colleague and Ann Dowd as the sympathetic support-system neighbor. But “The Friend” is an uneven, not wholly satisfying experience in most ways.
Watts is mainly the underreactor at the center of all this in a performance that could have used some lighter touches. And Murray — whose casting got the movie made — is almost an afterthought as a character, a bit of a cad, disgraced, but with the saving grace of having saved and loved a dog.
One can’t help but think of that famous W.C. Fields quote about never working with “children or dogs,” because of their inate ability to upstage the ostensible “star” in any given scene. Because there’s nothing like a melancholy Great Dane with big, camera-friendly eyes for grabbing attention and drawing it away from everyone and everything surrounding him.
Every scene Apollo isn’t in we miss him, proving Fields’ point.
Rating: R, discussions of suicide, profanity
Cast: Naomi Watts, Bill Murray, Sarah Pidgeon, Constance Wu, Noma Dumezweni, Josh Pais and Carla Gugino.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, based on the novel by Sigrid Nunez. A Bleecker Street release
Running time: 1:59
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